Doc. 11302 Report 231. The Romanian national delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly, in their carefully worded reply, ruled out the existence of unlawful CIA activity,207and appeared to offer prospects of constructive and transparent co-operation in the search for the truth. However, the Romanian Government and Parliament have preferred to keep control of information by directing everything through the Senate Committee,208and ultimately reverted to their initial position of complete denial.209 6. Human rights abuses involved in the CIA secret detention programme 6.1. Re-humanising the people held in secret detention 232. The policy of secret detentions and renditions pursued by the current United States administration has created a dangerous precedent of dehumanisation. Many of the people caught up in the CIA’s global spider’s web210are rightly described as “ghost prisoners”211because they have been made “invisible” for many years. 212 233. Meanwhile the United States Government’s descriptions of its captives in the “war on terror” can only serve to exacerbate this dehumanising effect. The administration routinely speaks of “aliens”, “deadly enemies” and “faceless terrorists”, with the clear intention of dehumanising its detainees in the eyes of the American population. The NGO community, for its part, calls them “ghost prisoners”. 234. By characterising the people held in secret detention as “different” from us – not as humans, but as ghosts, aliens or terrorists – the United States Government tries to lead us into the trap of thinking they are not like us, they are not subjects of the law, therefore their human rights do not deserve protection. 235. President Bush has laid this trap on multiple occasions as a means of diverting attention from the abusive conditions in which certain detainees in United States custody are being held.213Our team heard firsthand how distinctions are drawn in the mind of guards and interrogators: in an interview with one of our CIA 207. See, inter alia, “Answers of the Romanian delegation to the questionnaire on the alleged secret detention centres”, appended to the letter from Gyorgy Frunda, chairperson of the Romanian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly, to Dick Marty, 20 January 2006; pp. 5-6. The language of such submissions was carefully worded so as not to exclude the types of CIA operations I have described in this report: “No Romanian authority has any knowledge or information about any aircraft illegally transporting prisoners. No Romanian authority has been, legally or illegally, involved in secret transportation of prisoners … The Romanian Government has never issued any authorisation for any transport of prisoners via Romania.” 208. In two written decisions, on 14 and 21 November 2006, the Romanian Senate rejected the requests of the Romanian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly to respond to my correspondence directly, and instead assigned to the Senate Committee the sole authority for preparing Romania’s official responses. These decisions were followed by a fourmonth period during which we received no communications, ended only by Senator Nicolai’s submission of the Final Report by letter dated 20 May 2007. 209. At the end of my inquiry, the official position of Romania has developed no further than the original denials it adopted at the beginning. See “Response of the Romanian Government on the investigation initiated by the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, in accordance with Article 52 ECHR”, appended to the letter from Mihai-Ra˘zvan Ungureanu, Romanian Minister of Foreign Affairs, to Terry Davis, 15 February 2006; at page 4: “… no public official or other person acting in an official capacity has been involved in any manner in the unacknowledged deprivation of liberty of any individual, or transport of any individual while so deprived of their liberty … Official investigations have been conducted by several government authorities [whose] results confirmed that no such activities took place on Romanian territory.” 210. For the most comprehensive and authoritative known list of persons detained at one point by the United States, and whose fate and whereabouts remain unacknowledged, see the following report produced jointly by six leading human rights organisations: Amnesty International, Cageprisoners, Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law, Human Rights Watch and REPRIEVE, “Off the Record – U.S. Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the ‘War on Terror’”, 7 June 2007, available at http://www.chrgj.org/docs/OffRecord/ OFF_THE_RECORD_FINAL.pdf. 211. See, for example, various reports by Human Rights Watch: most recently “Ghost Prisoner – Two Years in Secret CIA Detention”, HRW Volume 19, No. 1(G), February 2007, available at: http://hrw.org/ reports/2007/us0207/ us0207webwcover.pdf; and earlier “List of ‘Ghost Prisoners’ Possibly in CIA Custody”, 30 November 2005, available at http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/11/30/usdom12109.htm. 212. In its report entitled “United States of America/Yemen: Secret Detention in CIA ‘Black Sites’”, Amnesty International described how one detainee had been transformed from a person his father described as a “very gentle man, who is always laughing”, to someone who sat through an encounter with “never even the ghost of a smile on his face”. See AI Index: AMR 51/177/2005, 8 November 2005, available at http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engamr511772005; at p. 2. 213. The speech delivered by President Bush on 6 September 2006 is a prime example of the type of rhetoric used to convince the audience that the people in American custody are inhuman and undeserving of empathy. The speech is strewn with references to “dangerous men”, “terrorist enemies” and “those who kill Americans”. Talking about Guantánamo 50