Red Cross in intense talks with US over secret jails

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – The Red Cross is pushing the United
States to give it access to prisoners held in secret jails as
part of the U.S. war on terror, it said on Friday.

“We have said that undisclosed detention is a major concern
for us,” Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told a news conference.

“We are already visiting very many detainees under U.S.
authorities in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan … We continue
to be in an intense dialogue with them with the aim of getting
access to all people detained in the framework of the so-called
war on terror,” he said.

Human rights groups accuse the CIA of running secret
prisons in eastern Europe and covertly transporting detainees.
They say incommunicado detention often leads to torture.

John Bellinger, the U.S. State Department’s legal adviser,
acknowledged to reporters in Geneva on Thursday that the ICRC
does not have access to all detainees held by U.S. forces, but
refused to discuss alleged secret detention centers.

The ICRC has been pressing the administration of U.S.
President George W. Bush for two years for information about
and access to what the agency calls “an unknown number of
people captured as part of the so-called global war on terror
and held in undisclosed locations.”

A Polish newspaper on Friday quoted an analyst of the
U.S.-based Human Rights Watch organization as saying Poland had
been the heart of the CIA’s secret detention network in Europe
until recently.

“Poland was the main base for CIA interrogations in Europe,
while Romania played more of a role in the transfer of detained
prisoners,” analyst Marc Garlasco was quoted by the daily
Gazeta Wyborcza as saying in an interview.

He said the allegations were based on information from CIA
sources and other documents obtained by Human Rights Watch. “We
have leads, circumstantial evidence to check but it’s too early
to reveal them,” Garlasco said.

Human Rights Watch said in a statement, however, that it
was still investigating CIA operations in eastern Europe.

“Human Rights Watch has not reached conclusions about CIA
operations in Eastern Europe,” it said in a statement issued by
its New York office.

“Human Rights Watch has collected information that CIA
airplanes traveling from Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 made
direct flights to remote airfields in Poland and Romania,” it
said in a statement issued by its New York office.

Poland and Romania deny hosting secret CIA jails and the
United States has declined to comment on the reports.

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Garlasco was quoted as saying the CIA had set up two
detention centers in Poland, which were closed shortly after
the Washington Post published an article about secret prisons
last month.

The Polish centers held a quarter of the 100 detainees
estimated held in such camps worldwide, he said.

Garlasco was not immediately available for comment.

Reports of secret jails in Poland and Romania have caused
controversy on both sides of the Atlantic and dogged U.S.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s European trip this week.

U.S. broadcaster ABC News this week reported that the
United States held al Qaeda suspects at two secret CIA prisons
in Eastern Europe until last month, when 11 prisoners were
relocated to a site somewhere in north Africa.

Poland is one of Washington’s leading allies in Europe,
where it irked EU heavyweights Germany and France by sending
troops to join the U.S.-led war with Iraq.

European countries responded to public pressure by seeking
answers from Washington before Rice’s trip, but appeared
reassured by her defense that the United States respected their
sovereignty and acted within the law in its war on terrorism.

United Nations human rights investigators on Friday chided
“many states” they said were trying to justify torture.

All human rights are inalienable rights of every person, 33
experts said in a joint statement. “They cannot be brushed
aside by governments when they become ‘inconvenient’.”

They did not name countries bending the rules. Along with
the accusations about secret CIA jails, a U.N. investigator
said last week torture was widespread in China.

“Torture and any form of cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment are prohibited in all circumstances,
including during a state of emergency,” the investigators said.