The American Gulag

The CIA’s network of secret prisons is turning into an international scandal.

A member of the Swiss government has launched an investigation into suspicious CIA activities in Eastern Europe over the past few years. He’s tracking the history of thirty-one planes and is looking for past satellite images of various sites in Poland and Romania.

If this investigation uncovers secret facilities, the shit will hit the fan, not only for the U.S. but for any other countries that cooperated with the CIA. Any country that was housing one of the CIA’s secret detention centers could be kicked out of the 46-member Council of Europe.

Swiss Senator Dick Marty said his investigation is based on a “moral obligation” to investigate whether the CIA was using secret prisons to interrogate terrorist suspects. Marty said there’s no proof of these secret prisons, but there were “many hints, such as suspicious moving patterns of aircraft, that have to be investigated.”

The U.S. government refuses to confirm or deny the existence of these secret CIA prisons. These allegations were leaked by the Washington Post more than three weeks ago. Republicans quickly launched an investigation – not into whether the CIA was running secret torture centers. No, they just wanted to know who leaked this information to the media.

The day after the Washington Post story, Human Rights Watch said it had evidence of CIA prisons in Poland and Romania. Airports in Spain, Ireland and Cyprus may have taken part in the covert transfer of prisoners to CIA prisons.

Marty is hoping Sen. John Kerry will share any information he obtains from Rumsfeld on the existence of the CIA prisons.

So far, most of Bush’s -----“gate” scandals have been confined to domestic politics. Gulag-gate, Stalin-gate, whatever we end up calling it, might reverberate all across Europe and the Middle East.