The Senate
\nleadership will next week decide whether to officially request the
\ndeclassification of the documents included in the US Congress report on the
\nexistence of secret CIA detention facilities on Romanian territory. Also next
\nweek Parliament will discuss the set up of a new Committee in charge of
\nre-launching the internal investigation on this topic. Senators from the
\nRomanian Defense Committee proposed this line of action following their recent
\nmeeting with MEPs members of the European Commission Committee for Civil
\nLiberties, Justice and Home Affairs.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As a signatory to the UN Universal
\nDeclaration of Human Rights, Romania
\ncondemns illegal interrogation and torture methods, Liberal Senator Marius
\nObreja, the chairman of the Senate’s Defense Committee explained. Obreja said
\nno additional evidence, other than the content of the Senate’s original report
\nfrom the 2006-2008 period, points to the existence of the so-called US
\nintelligence ‘black sites’. For over a decade, Romania has been on a list of
\ncountries suspected of having hosted CIA secret facilities. Nevertheless,
\nlittle evidence to substantiate this claim has surfaced since then. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This
\nspring, the former Social-Democrat president of Romania in the early 2000s Ion
\nIliescu admitted he provided CIA with such a facility as a sign of good will
\ntowards the US, ahead of Romania’s NATO accession. Romanian authorities however
\nhad no part in the activity of the US intelligence service and were not aware
\nof what was really happening, Iliescu insisted. This is the second time, after
\nPolish president Aleksander Kwasniewski, that a head of state goes public about
\nthe existence of CIA secret facilities in Europe. We were allies, we were
\nfighting together in Afghanistan and the Middle East, Ion Iliescu said
\nreferring to the period post 9\/11. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Shocked by the horrendous loss of lives in
\nthe tragic terrorist attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda radicals, global public
\nopinion was less adamant back then about the methods used by US and allied
\nagents. At the time the popular stake was to prevent such massacres from
\nreoccurring, all the more so as after 9\/11 Madrid and London were targeted by
\nnew terrorist attacks. Only later did the debate arise surrounding the
\nso-called ‘black sites’ and the unwarranted use of violence in interrogation of
\nterrorist suspects. Liberal MEP Norica Nicolai believes Iliescu’s statements
\nbring nothing new and do not dismiss the conclusions of Parliament’s
\nInvestigation Committee of 2008, which she led as a Romanian Senator back then.
\nThe Senate’s report concluded that there was no evidence back then in Romania
\nconfirming the existence of CIA secret facilities or rendition flights. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The much-debated secret detention centers in Europe are again in the public limelight in Bucharest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":65531,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37738],"tags":[38169,38170],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-65530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-today-in-the-news","tag-cia","tag-detention-centre"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n