US Senate confirms Gina Haspel as CIA director despite role in torture program

The European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday that Lithuania and Romania were complicit in a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to hold terror suspects at secret detention sites on their territories. The ruling was made in the case in which terror suspect Abd Al Rahim Husseyn Muhammad Al Nashiri, who is now being held in the Internment Facility at the United States (US) Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, said Romania let the CIA take him to the secret prison on its territory and torture him. The Strasbourg, France-based court said Thursday that Abd al-Rahim Al Nashiri, a Saudi national later sent to Guantanamo Bay, was detained and abused in Romania between Sept. 2003 and Oct. 2005, and urged Romania to investigate and punish perpetrators. The former Soviet republic of Lithuania was found complicit in hosting a secret prison from February 2005 to March 2006, when CIA operatives held Abu Zubaydah, considered a top Palestinian operative for Al Qaeda. Following the release of the US Senate summary of the still classified 6,700-page report documenting the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, the prosecutor general’s office claims to have sent a formal request for legal assistance to US authorities. Thus, the ECHR ruled that Romania violated several articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, including the prohibition on torture, as Al Nashiri suffered “inhuman treatment” in Romania, and held that the country was to pay EUR 100,000 in damages to Al Nashiri. Following the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the CIA operated a global, state-sanctioned program in which it abducted scores of people throughout the world, held them in secret detention – sometimes for years – or “rendered” them to various countries, and tortured or otherwise ill-treated them.
The European Court of Human Rights rules that the Romanian and Lithuanian governments each knowingly hosted CIA secret prisons around 2005. Both countries also participated in the US extraordinary rendition program: one case by each country is acknowledged. Four years ago, Poland was also condemned for running a CIA secret jail.