What a tangled web

Judging by reactions to this report, Marty is on to something.

Fourteen European nations colluded with U.S. intelligence in a "spider's web" of secret flights and detention centers that violated international human rights
law, the head of an investigation into alleged CIA clandestine prisons said
Wednesday.

Swiss senator Dick Marty said the nations aided the movement of 17 detainees who said they had been abducted by U.S. agents and secretly transferred to detention centers around the world.

Some said they were transferred to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and others to alleged secret facilities in countries including Poland, Romania, Egypt and Jordan. Some said they were mistreated or tortured.

Marty provided no direct evidence but charged that most European governments "did not seem particularly eager to establish" the facts.

"Even if proof, in the classical meaning of the term, is not as yet available, a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that such secret detention centers did indeed exist in Europe," he wrote, saying this warranted further investigation.

He listed 14 European countries — Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Bosnia,
Macedonia, Turkey, Spain, Cyprus, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Romania and Poland
— as being complicit in "unlawful inter-state transfers" of people.

He may not have proof yet, but take a look at the reactions to the report.

Some, including Sweden and Bosnia, already have admitted some involvement.

Officials in Romania and Poland denied the allegations Wednesday.

Poland's prime minister denied Wednesday that CIA planes carrying terror suspects ever stopped or dropped off prisoners in Poland.

"This is slander and it's not based on any facts," Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz told reporters in Warsaw.

Really? Slander? Maybe he should ask around a little before issuing a categorical denial.

Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski admitted he had heard of a few cases of secret landings by CIA planes in Poland, saying it was "natural" in the global fight against terrorism.

Yes, it's natural to abduct citizens off the street with only scant evidence and without even being sure they are who you think they are, drug them and fly them to countries whose regimes are known to practice torture, detain them for months or years without notifying anyone about their whereabouts, then maybe drop them off in the middle of nowhere and deny anything ever happened. Totally natural.

Our feelings about whether abducting and torturing citizens is a natural way to combat terror aside, we have an apparent differnce of opinion among highly placed Polish government officials regarding Poland's complicity in the CIA's rendition program.

Romeo Raicu, head of Romania's parliamentary committee overseeing foreign intelligence services, told The Associated Press: "There is no evidence there were such detention bases in Romania."

And, of course, a classic Bush administration-style non-denial denial. That there is no evidence is not in question. But a man in a position to know whether these facilities existed didn't deny they existed. But he did throw in a little responsibility shedding, another classic learned at the knee of the Bush administration.

He noted that agreements with the U.S. and NATO allow their aircraft to land in Romania and to fly over Romanian territory.

"The responsibility for what those planes transport is not Romania's responsibility," he said.

Which brings us to Tony Blair:

"I have to say, the Council of Europe report has absolutely nothing new in it," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said.

Takes you back to the heady days of the Downing Street memo, when "Downing Street claimed the document contained 'nothing new.' " And we all know how well that statement reflected reality.