Wikileaks: NATO Blocked Kosovo Secret Prison Probe

A Wikileaks memo says the Council of Europe's Secretary General, Terry Davis, threatened to go public about the use of a NATO facility in Kosovo as a secret prison after the alliance failed to cooperate with a CoE investigation.

According to a memo dated December 2005, the alliance had failed to provide adequate responses to seven requests for information sent by the Council, CoE.

The comments were made in a meeting between Davis and the US ambassador to France. “Given NATO's obstructionism", Davis told the ambassador, "he would have no choice but to "go public" over the issue in early 2006,” the memo reads.

According to the memo, Davis said that Kosovo was a “black hole” for the CoE committee on the Prevention of Torture, CPT, as NATO was not cooperating with his requests for information.

At the time, the CoE rapporteur, Dick Marty, was investigating US use of secret prisons and extraordinary rendition in Europe and in January 2006 he produced his first report.

Extraordinary rendition is the abduction and illegal transfer of a person from one nation to another.

Since 2001, it is believed that the US has used rendition and secret prisons to move terrorist suspects across the world and sometimes to countries where torture is used to extract information, it is alleged.

In the 2006 report, entitled "Alleged Secret Detentions in Council of Europe Member States", the CoE complained that it had not been able to inspect camps in Kosovo.

According to the report, Gil-Robles, the CoE’s Commissioner for Human Rights, had concluded that NATO’s Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo had “many parallels with Guantanamo: prisoners arrested without recourse to any kind of judicial procedure or legal representation”.

Bondsteel is one of the US's largest post-war military bases on foreign soil and is located in southern Kosovo.

The memo released by Wikileaks goes further than the CoE report, saying that it was suspected that the US used Kosovo as a secret CIA prison.

“Davis concluded that others, but not he, had begun to 'connect the dots' and were speculating that Kosovo might be a site for secret CIA prisons free from international scrutiny,” it reads.

A more lengthy CoE report, released in June 2006, entitled "Alleged Secret Detentions and Unlawful Interstate Transfers involving Council of Europe Member States", again described Kosovo as a “black hole” for CoE's inspections.

“This is frankly intolerable, considering that the international intervention in this region was meant to
restore order and lawfulness,” the report said.

The report also revealed that a fax from the Egyptian Ministry of European Affairs, sent to the Egyptian embassy in London, intercepted by Swiss Intelligence Services, listed Kosovo as the site of a CIA secret prison.

NATO has consistently denied the claims. When contacted yesterday, the organisation’s Brussels headquarters refused to comment.