Stefan Nicola
UPI Germany Correspondent
KEHL AM RHEIN, Germany -- The new German government is under pressure to seek a clarification from the United States on reports that several secret CIA flights with terrorist suspects aboard landed in Germany.
"The Foreign Minister (Frank-Walter Steinmeier) should talk to the U.S. ambassador," German lawmaker Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger on Wednesday told the daily Berliner Zeitung. "If the allegations were true, that would be outrageous."
The Berlin-based daily on Tuesday reported at least six CIA planes touched down on Frankfurt's Rhein-Main-Airbase, including a Hercules C-130 that left the base for Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 21, 2003. The four-engine turboprop aircraft was intercepted over Austrian airspace by two Austrian military jets, which accompanied the plane until it left the country. Officials in Vienna afterward complained to Washington about the unapproved military overflight.
The report has caused uproar in Germany and Austria with officials demanding a clarification whether the clandestine flights and pit stops are connected with the allegation that the CIA runs secret prisons in Eastern Europe and Asia where terrorist suspects are interrogated and tortured.
The allegation has the so-called "rendition flights" move al-Qaida and other Islamic terror prisoners to third countries where they can be interrogated beyond the reach of international human rights legislation.
The United States and its allies wage a fierce war against terrorism since the attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001. The claims that Washington makes use of torture first surfaced with the horrific pictures of prisoner abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. The Washington Post in an article published on Nov. 2 then mentioned the existence of "black sites," secret detention camps "known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country."
Several European governments, including Spain, Sweden, Norway and Finland, have begun investigations into whether unauthorized prisoner-transfer flights touched down on their domestic airfields. According to media reports, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, acting on behalf of the European Union, is set to send off a letter to Washington, asking the Bush administration if the secret prisons really exist.
The U.N. Human Rights Commission is also looking into the matter. Its special envoy on torture, Austrian Manfred Nowak, has just called off an inspection at the U.S. war prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because officials refused to grant him access to inmates there.
"Even in China I could speak to the prisoners," he told the German weekly Die Zeit in its issue that is to be published Thursday. He said he was convinced "the United States apparently has something to hide in connection with Guantanamo."
Washington has so far argued the reports are exaggerating and vows it doesn't use torture.
Asked last week about recent media stories concerning CIA planes flying detainees to secret destinations in Europe, including Spain, U.S. Assistant Secretary Daniel Fried said: "We have conducted our struggle against terrorism in accordance with our values and our international obligations, and I am quite confident that we have not violated Spanish law."
Back in Germany, concerns rise that terror suspects kidnapped by the CIA have frequently landed there. The Zweibruecken district attorney has launched a criminal investigation against unknown for kidnapping and constraint in connection with the disappearance of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, a terrorist suspect who was abducted in Milan, Italy in February of 2003. An Italian court believes the CIA kidnapped the man and flew him to Egypt, making a pit-stop on Germany's Ramstein Air Force Base. At the moment, nothing is known about the man's whereabouts.
"German officials don't know what goes on in Ramstein," Beate Rudolf, a human rights expert at Berlin's Free University, told United Press International in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "But I don't think torture would be risked in a country like Germany."
Rudolf said the German government should nevertheless follow the urge of the opposition and demand a clarification from the United States.
"If German officials did know anything about these prisoner transports, that would be very, very serious," she told UPI. "But even if they didn't, we are talking about human rights violations of the most serious kind, and they should be interested if that happened on German soil."
The allegations must come at a bad time for Merkel: The new German leader has vowed to strengthen the trans-Atlantic friendship, which had suffered under her predecessor Schroeder because of a rift over the U.S.-led war in Iraq. If the accusations prove to be true, Merkel will face her first serious test in international diplomacy.
In any case, talk about prisoner abuse, kidnapping and secret detention facilities are hurting the war against terrorism, Rudolf said.
"If we want to defend our Western values against radical Islamism we have to stand by these values. If we don't, we undermine the legitimacy of the overall cause."
