A European human rights investigator says there is evidence that the US outsourced torture to other European countries, and that the involved countries know about it.
Oh, and that evidence he says he has? Well, it doesn’t really exist. Yet, the story gets reported as if he does.
Swiss senator Dick Marty, who heads an investigation by the Council of Europe human rights watchdog, said he had not uncovered any irrefutable evidence to confirm allegations that the CIA operated secret detention centers in Europe.
His remarks, in a preliminary report, kept pressure on the CIA and European governments over allegations that the U.S. intelligence agency flew prisoners through airports in Europe to jails in third countries where they may have been tortured.
“There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of ‘relocation’ or ‘outsourcing of torture’,” Marty said in his initial report into the allegations for the 46-nation Council, based in the eastern French city of Strasbourg.
He said it had been proved that “individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and transported to different destinations in Europe, to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered degrading treatment and torture.”
A “great deal of coherent, convergent evidence” huh? Fine, hand it over. Oh, I forgot! You don’t really have that “great deal of coherent, convergent evidence”. It probably just feels good to say it though right?
Denis MacShane, a former minister for Europe in U.S. ally Britain, told reporters that Marty’s report “has more holes than a Swiss cheese.”
“I have read it carefully and there is nothing new, no proof, no witness statement, no document that justifies the claims made,” MacShane, a British member of parliament, said.
“The report simply re-circulates newspaper allegations and sustains the anti-American propaganda that seeks to divide the democracies of Europe and the world when we should be united to defeat those who murdered hundreds of Europeans in (bomb attacks in) Madrid and London, and who plan fresh attacks.”
This is exactly what we have here. The press has made unsubstantiated, baseless allegations, and anti-American groups have jumped on it. Why? Because they hate Bush and his policies. And that’s a good enough reason to continue to report fiction as fact I guess. I was watching ‘The Today Show’ on NBC and you know what? They reported this story, but stuffed the part about the evidence not really existing. As usual, the MSM feeds on this kind of stuff, and they run with the story until it is finally refuted, then they’ll run a correction on page ‘E-28’, or in the case of the Today Show, they’ll ignore it.