Romania’s Inquiry Into Case Regarding CIA Prisons On Its Territory Insufficient – CoE Commissioner

"The findings in the 2006 and 2007 reports by Senator Dick Marty for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe regarding the roles of Poland and Romania in the CIA's system of secret detentions, transfers and interrogations of terrorist suspects have still not been convincingly clarified," said Hammarberg on the Council of Europe's website.

Hammarberg highlighted that "the efforts to date of the Polish prosecutors, as well as the inquiry carried out by a Committee of the Romanian Senate, leave questions unanswered regarding the use of national territory to host CIA secret prisons, and the participation of national services in maintaining the security and secrecy of CIA operations." He criticized Sweden and Macedonia for not having run full investigations into alleged cases of secret detention.

"One reason for the reluctance among European governments to allow robust truth-seeking procedures is obviously the fear of damaging relations with the U.S. intelligence services. Exchange of secret information between the security agencies is essential for each of them," said Hammarberg.

Romania's Foreign Intelligence Service said last year it does not have any data or information regarding the existence of a CIA detention center in Bucharest, as the New York Times wrote in its online edition on August 13, 2009.

"In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency's main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world's most threatening terrorists. Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money - whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency's operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment (…) Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth," the New York Times wrote.

According to the American daily there was information about the existence of such prisons meant to hold al-Qaida terrorists, but it was kept secret.

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