Europe avoids pressing US on "secret prisons"
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-11-18 09:14

European governments have avoided pressing Washington to address allegations it runs secret prisons in the region despite growing public concern over U.S. detainee policies, diplomats said on Thursday.

In the face of persistent media questions, the Bush administration has refused to confirm or deny newspaper reports and rights groups' accusations this month it has kept Islamic militants incommunicado in Europe.

European media have increasingly delved in recent weeks into CIA flights suspected of transferring "ghost detainees" around the continent and some countries have begun looking into the movements.

But, apart from hand-wringing by some officials, governments have largely remained quiet on the allegations of secret prisons and the European Union has refused to heed rights groups' calls for investigations.

"It's not jeopardizing our relationships or, I think, negatively impacting the broad range of our cooperation," State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters.

When they have raised the allegations with U.S. diplomats, governments have done so only as part of wide-ranging discussions and avoided probing too deeply, U.S. and European diplomats said.

"They don't want to find the answers to these questions," said Tom Malinowski, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

"It would mean digging into relations between intelligence agencies that few European governments want to reveal. And it could mean awkward disputes with whichever countries hosted these prisons -- and with the United States."

The Washington Post said U.S. secret prisons were in Eastern Europe but decided against identifying the countries at the CIA's request. Malinowski's New York-based group has said flight records point to Poland and Romania as likely hosts.

Rights groups say incommunicado detention is illegal and often leads to torture.

MORAL LEADERSHIP?

The muted official response is in contrast to the public outrage in many European nations that began with opposition to the war in Iraq and has been stoked by abuse scandals there and at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Citing an example of one discussion, Ereli said Spanish officials mentioned media reports about CIA flights on their territory in only a "general and brief" way when Daniel Fried, the top U.S. diplomat for Europe, visited this week.

On his European tour, Fried acknowledged the public debate over U.S. detainee policies, but told reporters, "I have not heard a great deal from my European colleagues."

A U.S. official familiar with some of the bilateral conversations complained that in countries such as Italy and Spain, some complaints were driven by local politics.

"There's some grandstanding going on and what they say in public is quite different to what we hear in private," said the official, who asked not to be identified because his remarks were critical of foreign authorities.

European governments generally look for the United States to show moral leadership and have expressed discomfort with U.S. detainee policies that undermine the West's drive for greater freedoms worldwide.

But European diplomats in Washington said their governments could not easily raise the secret prisons allegations because they had no substance to base any concerns on and risked irking the Bush administration.

One diplomat, who asked not to be identified because the remarks concerned private meetings, said: "You have to bring it up because of the noise back home. But you do so in as low-key way as possible."