Black Site: Brief Update

According to news reports in Vienna's Der Standard and the Italian paper Il Manifesto, a UN investigator in Afghanistan, Cheriff Bassiouni (who is an academic from Egypt) has stated that a secret CIA prison existed in Hungary. It's not clear what information his statement is based on, but it certainly fits with my suspicions. (So that's obviously ground to speculate, no? God, the quality on this blogging lark..)

I hadn't heard of Bassiouni, but it seems he's a professor of international law who chaired the drafting committee for the statute of the International Criminal Court. His current job is as the UN's Independent Expert on Human Rights in Afghanistan, a thankless task if ever there was one. A copy of the Italian article appears to be here. Although I don't read Italian to any extent, he seems to say that Poland, Romania and Hungary have breached the European Convention on Human Rights, and to have prepared a report on secret CIA detentions. I have the impression that he thinks his appointment will not be renewed because of this report.

He also has this to say:

In Afghanistan, nella base aerea di Bagram e a Kandahar, arrivavano i detenuti prelevati con aerei Cia da ogni parte del mondo e da lì gli afghani venivano smistati verso gli altri 14 centri militari segreti americani per essere torturati. Gli altri, dall'Afghanistan venivano spediti nelle carceri segrete sotto controllo americano: in paesi dell'est europeo come Polonia, Romania, Ungheria oppure, gli asiatici, nella base militare di Diego Garcia.

Well, I don't read Italian but I think that's sufficiently fucking clear. What I would very much like to see would be a copy of this report, and before that to have someone who reads better Italian take a peek at the text.

I strongly suspect the Hungarian site is Taszar (as previously blogged), the air base where Ahmed Chalabi's followers were meant to be trained for the invasion of Iraq as "Free Iraqi Forces". The training programme was widely reported to have been a failure (you get the feeling the Chalabi Boys weren't keen on route marches across the Puszta with heavy packs and muddy boots compared to hobnobbing with the mighty..and Christopher Hitchens), but what else might have happened there? And what was a Boeing 727 belonging to Miami Air International, Inc, doing going there on the 9th April, 2003...an aircraft that was also used by the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign? (Link may not work - site is subscription with limited visitor access) That last may be coincidential, of course.

Mind you, if you're Romania's intelligence chief, there's an easy way to deal with this stuff: blame George Soros for spreading the story in order to divert terrorists' attention away from the US and UK - after all he is "close to the US Democrats". Mmm, crack...nice.

Update: N804MA was, I now know, used by the 2000 Bush campaign. Who took it to Taszar, then?