1,245 CIA-operated flights flew over European airspace or stopped over at airports in Europe after 9/11

i posted the other day on marie brenner's vanity fair article about charles swift in which he said that the purpose of guantánamo is torture... i think it's abundantly clear that is also the purpose of extraordinary rendition...

European Union lawmakers on Wednesday approved a final report which slams EU governments for tolerating or assisting the United States' practice of secret detentions of terrorist suspects.

More than 10 European states, including Britain, Poland, Italy and Germany aided or knew about the US secret service CIA's clandestine programme of taking terrorism suspects to other countries for interrogation, Euro MPs said in their report.

At least 1,245 CIA-operated flights flew over European airspace or stopped over at airports in Europe after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US, Euro MPs concluded.

i'm not surprised about the uk or poland... and, even tho' we've know about it for a while, i'm still surprised about germany and italy...

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The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture

in a lengthy, blockbuster article, vanity fair provides a detailed examination of guantánamo in the context of former military attorney charles swift and the case of hamdan vs. rumsfeld...

The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture. Why do this? Because you want to escape the rule of law. There is only one thing that you want to escape the rule of law to do, and that is to question people coercively—what some people call torture. Guantánamo and the military commissions are implements for breaking the law. Why build a prison here when there are plenty of prisons in Nebraska? Why is it, when we see photos of Abu Ghraib, we think that it is "exporting Guantánamo"? That it is the "Guantánamo method"?

[...]

[W]hy a military commission? Because if you torture someone, it is the only way you can get their statements in and not have to admit it in public.

—Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, January 2007, to the author, Marie Brenner, in the article, Taking on Guantánamo, Vanity Fair, March 2007.

escaping the rule of law... the motto of and, hopefully, the epitaph of the bush administration...

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