Rights groups accuse Europe, Albania of CIA flight cover-up

TIRANA, Dec. 19 – Two human rights groups said on Monday that 28 mostly European countries, including Albania, have failed to comply with freedom of information requests about their involvement in secret CIA flights carrying suspected terrorists.
London-based Reprieve and Madrid-based Access Info Europe on Monday accused European nations of covering up their compliance in the so-called “extraordinary rendition” program by failing to release flight-traffic data that could show the paths of the planes.
Along with the United States– Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania and Norway released the information. Five countries said they did not have it (Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Slovenia).
The groups have not received a reply from Albania, Austria, Azerbaijan, Cape Verde, Georgia, France, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Romania, Russia, Spain and Turkey.
Canada, Portugal and Sweden declined to release the information, as did Brussels-based Eurocontrol.
Europe’s silence is in contrast to the United States, which handed over Federal Aviation Administration records with data on more than 27,000 flight segments.
The CIA has never acknowledged specific locations, but prisons overseen by U.S. officials reportedly operate in Thailand, Afghanistan, Lithuania, Poland and Romania, where terror suspects including Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, were interrogated in the basement of a government building in the capital, Bucharest.
In a 2007 probe, Swiss politician Dick Marty accused 14 European governments of permitting the CIA to run detention centers or carry out rendition flights over their territories between 2002 and 2005.