One intriguing portion of the Council of Europe’s report into secret CIA prisons in Europe comes when trying to explain the opposition this inquiry has faced from the U.S. and from some European governments. In particular, early in the report, chief investigator Dick Marty cites Germany and Italy as key sources of obstruction. At paragraph 17, Marty offers an opaque explanation:
In the course of our investigations and through various specific circumstances, we have become aware of certain special mechanisms, many of them covert, employed by intelligence services in their counter-terrorist activities. It is no for us to judge these methods, although in this area, too, great liberties appear to be taken with lawfulness. Many of these methods give rise to chain reactions of blackmail and lies between different agencies and institutions in individual states, as well as between states. Therein may lie at least a partial explanation for certain governments’ fierce opposition to revealing the truth. We cannot go into this phenomenon without putting human lives at risk…
It sounds a lot like Marty is accusing the European intelligence services, the CIA, the U.S. and various member-states with potentially threatening one another for cooperating with his investigation. A former senior CIA official tells Muckraker this is “complete bullshit,” smacking of European politicians’ paranoia over the supposedly limitless power of intelligence agencies. “They’re always worried about mystical things — for a long time, they thought the U.S. was manipulating their economies,” says the ex-official, who emphasizes that he doesn’t have first-hand knowledge about the inquiry. But partner intelligence services would “never, ever expose each other.”
The ex-official’s alternative explanation: the Council, lacking formal investigating authority into member states’ national-security apparatus, “ran into some kind of block” — evidently from Germany and Italy — and “to fill in the gap, they relied on an ongoing tendency to blame intelligence agencies.” And Marty does write that “The resources at our disposal to address the issues presented to us are completely inadequate to the task.” But if Marty isn’t simply blowing smoke, his inquiry may underscore how acrimonious an issue the secret prisons were between officials in the U.S. and Europe, as well as among European security officials.