The CIA Detention Centers in Romania

The much-debated secret detention centers in Europe are again in the public limelight in Bucharest.

Bogdan Matei, 06.10.2015, 13:15

The Senate
leadership will next week decide whether to officially request the
declassification of the documents included in the US Congress report on the
existence of secret CIA detention facilities on Romanian territory. Also next
week Parliament will discuss the set up of a new Committee in charge of
re-launching the internal investigation on this topic. Senators from the
Romanian Defense Committee proposed this line of action following their recent
meeting with MEPs members of the European Commission Committee for Civil
Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.

As a signatory to the UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, Romania
condemns illegal interrogation and torture methods, Liberal Senator Marius
Obreja, the chairman of the Senate’s Defense Committee explained. Obreja said
no additional evidence, other than the content of the Senate’s original report
from the 2006-2008 period, points to the existence of the so-called US
intelligence ‘black sites’. For over a decade, Romania has been on a list of
countries suspected of having hosted CIA secret facilities. Nevertheless,
little evidence to substantiate this claim has surfaced since then.

This
spring, the former Social-Democrat president of Romania in the early 2000s Ion
Iliescu admitted he provided CIA with such a facility as a sign of good will
towards the US, ahead of Romania’s NATO accession. Romanian authorities however
had no part in the activity of the US intelligence service and were not aware
of what was really happening, Iliescu insisted. This is the second time, after
Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski, that a head of state goes public about
the existence of CIA secret facilities in Europe. We were allies, we were
fighting together in Afghanistan and the Middle East, Ion Iliescu said
referring to the period post 9/11.

Shocked by the horrendous loss of lives in
the tragic terrorist attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda radicals, global public
opinion was less adamant back then about the methods used by US and allied
agents. At the time the popular stake was to prevent such massacres from
reoccurring, all the more so as after 9/11 Madrid and London were targeted by
new terrorist attacks. Only later did the debate arise surrounding the
so-called ‘black sites’ and the unwarranted use of violence in interrogation of
terrorist suspects. Liberal MEP Norica Nicolai believes Iliescu’s statements
bring nothing new and do not dismiss the conclusions of Parliament’s
Investigation Committee of 2008, which she led as a Romanian Senator back then.
The Senate’s report concluded that there was no evidence back then in Romania
confirming the existence of CIA secret facilities or rendition flights.