The Council of Europe and Amnesty International have said that they suspect that there were at least 800 flights over Europe that could have been transporting prisioners to black sites in Romania and Poland. Below is a graphic put together by Le Monde. 
The circles shows the number of flights using European airports between Sept. 2001 and today.
The light orange colored countries are those suspected of housing the prisions (Romainia, Poland, Tchez Republic,Kosovo).
The circles and stars are the locations of U.S. Military bases in Europe.
The accusations have to be verified, and this probably won't happen. No one really wants to know because the Council of Europe would then have to consider taking measures, meaning kicking those countries with secret prisions out of the EU. This is really all they could do. We all know that isn't going to happen.
In other news, Turkey is augementing its presence on its Southwestern border with Northern Iraq. This could get very interesting.
Friday, June 08, 2007
Black Sites and Turkey Saber Rattling
Posted by USWest at 4:19 PM
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2 comments:
OK, I'm sympathetic to alarms being raised about this. Two things though. First, the EU has investigated this already and published more or less what Le Monde is saying...that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that renditions are taking place with European cooperation. Second, if Poland and Romania are the countries where the prisons are, why are there only 10 flights between them? It makes me think that the method used for identifying the flights for the Le Monde story is either dramatically undercounting the flights or they're pointing the finger at Poland and Romania in error.
I think you are misinterpreting the graphic. The circles show the European airports used as stop- over or transfer points. This is why there are 430 flights in and around Germany even though it isn't accused of having housed a detention center.
What the EU and human rights groups have said is that the detention centers were abandoned Soviet air strips in Poland and Romania, which would have been destinations rather than tansfer points. So the 10 flights RBR refers to would have been the major airports that served as transfer points rather than destinations.
Now, that said, the graphic may be trying to show too much in one space. The Map is showing one thing, the written capsuls are highlighting specfiic flights. The inlaid map is showing specific flgihts done on specific planes from Jan 2004-Jan 2005.
Le Monde is simply reporting what the Council of Europe has discovered. The Council of Europe is cobbling together disserparate pieces of information from Amnesty, HR Watch, media outlets such as Der Spiegel, ABC news, and official sources.
But it is a bit confusing, I admit.
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