Last week, a special committee of the European Parliament issued an interim report concluding that the CIA has on several occasions illegally kidnapped and detained individuals in European countries. The report also found that the CIA detained and then secretly used airlines to transfer persons to countries like Egypt and Afghanistan, which routinely use torture during interrogations.
Rendition is known to have been a CIA practice for some years. But its frequency increased exponentially after 9/11, with reportedly dozens of prisoners being kidnapped from Italy, Sweden and other European countries. Italy is currently suing the US for kidnapping an Italian citizen on Italian soil.
The US Senate has passed an amendment mandating that the Defense Secretary inform Congress about U.S.-run secret prison facilities in foreign countries.
Jakob Kellenberger, President of the ICRC, deplored the fact that the U.S. authorities had not moved closer to granting the ICRC access to persons held in undisclosed locations," the Geneva-based agency said.
Kellenberger said: "No matter how legitimate the grounds for detention, there exists no right to conceal a person's whereabouts or to deny that he or she is being detained."
The former senior Swiss diplomat said that the ICRC would continue to seek access to such people as a matter of priority.
Earlier, a report by investigators for the European Parliament said last month they had evidence that the CIA had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over Europe since 2001, in some cases transporting terrorist suspects abducted within the European Union to countries known to use torture.
But in an appearance before the UN Committee on Torture, the body that monitors compliance with the Geneva Convention, the lead State Department attorney labeled as "absurd" charges that prisoners being rendered were on all these flights.
He added that terrorist suspects could pose a threat to security if allowed to meet with ICRC representatives.
Addressing reporters after the hearing concluded, Bellinger said that provisions in the torture convention that prohibit transferring detainees to countries where they could be tortured do not apply to detainee "transfers that take place outside of the United States." He added, however, that the U.S. has "as a policy matter, applied exactly the same standards" to such transfers.
The "state secrets" privilege being used by the Government in the El-Masri case is a series of U.S. legal precedents allowing the federal government to dismiss legal cases that it claims would threaten foreign policy, military intelligence, or national security.
A relic of the Cold War with the then-Soviet Union, it has been invoked several times since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Judges have denied the privilege on only five occasions.
It was used against Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, who was fired in retaliation for reporting security breaches and possible espionage within the Bureau. Lower courts dismissed the case when former Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the state secrets privilege and the Supreme Court upheld that decision. It has also been used to block legal actions by other "whistleblowers" who work in the national security field.
Most recently, it was used to block a lawsuit against the US Government by Mahar Arar, a Canadian citizen who was detained by American authorities at John F. Kennedy International Airport, then shipped off to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year before being released without any charges ever having been made against him.
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