Britain's role in CIA "torture flights" was roundly condemned on Tuesday by the European parliament in a scathing report which for the first time named the site of a suspected secret US detention centre in the EU at Stare Kiejkuty in Poland.

It says EU governments, including the British, knew about the practice known as extraordinary rendition secret CIA flights transferring detainees to locations where they risked being tortured but made a concerted attempt to obstruct investigations into it.

The Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) singled out Geoff Hoon, the minister for Europe, saying they deplored his attitude to their special committee's inquiry into the CIA flights. They expressed outrage at what they said was the view of the chief legal adviser to the Foreign Office, Sir Michael Wood, that "receiving or possessing" information extracted under torture, if there was no direct participation in the torture, was not per se banned under international law. They said Sir Michael declined to give evidence to the committee.

The report condemned the extraordinary rendition of two UK residents, Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi citizen , and Jamil el-Banna, a Jordanian citizen, seized in the Gambia in 2002. They were "turned over to US agents and flown to Afghanistan and then to Guantnamo, where they remain detained without trial or any form of judicial assistance," it said.

The men's abduction was helped "by partly erroneous information" supplied by MI5. It also condemned the treatment of Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian citizen and UK resident arrested in Pakistan and at one point held in Morocco where questions "appear to have been inspired by information supplied by the UK." His lawyer has described what the report called "horrific torture."

It referred to the rendition of Martin Mubanga, a UK citizen arrested in Zambia in 2002 and flown to Guantnamo Bay. It said he was interrogated by British officials at the US detention centre in Cuba where he was held and tortured for four years and then released without trial.

It expressed "serious concern" about 170 stopovers at British airports by CIA-operated aircraft which on many occasions came from, or were bound for, countries linked with "extraordinary rendition circuits."

Tuesday's report described in detail how CIA Gulfstream jets landed in secret at Szymany airport in Poland. There was circumstantial evidence, it said, that there may have been a secret detention centre at the nearby intelligence training centre at Stare Kiejkuty. It disclosed that records, from a confidential source, of an EU and NATO meeting with the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, last December confirmed "member states had knowledge of the (US) programme of extraordinary renditions and secret prisons."

It criticised EU officials such as foreign policy chief Javier Solana and counter-terrorism co-ordinator Gijs de Vries for a lack of co-operation with the inquiry, and Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO's secretary-general, for declining to give evidence.

Source: China Daily