Doc. 11302 Report 29. Building upon the June 2006 interim report,6I have now concentrated on placing the CIA programme properly within the “global spider’s web” – the image I used to describe the system of secret detentions and detainee transfers spun out around the world by the United States Government and its allies. In this context, our interest has been concentrated on the role played by the member states of the Council of Europe that acted as “hosts” for CIA secret detentions. 30. As this report will make clear, the HVD programme has depended on extraordinary authorisations – unprecedented in nature and scope – at both national and international levels. The secret of its very existence was successfully guarded for several years, and until today, very little detail has been published about the terms used to refer to it, the way the system has operated, the underlying authorisations and arrangements that have sustained it, or even the reasons as to why it has so successfully been covered up. 31. Questions such as where the detention sites have been located and what conditions the detainees have been kept in were declared last year by President Bush to be too sensitive for him to answer officially, on the grounds that “doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution”.7 32. Indeed, even when the revelations of secret detentions in “several democracies in eastern Europe” first emerged in November 2005,8 the publication responsible for breaking the story, The Washington Post, made a decision not to publish the names of the states which had hosted CIA “black sites”, although it was aware of this information. The newspaper’s decision followed a meeting at the White House and an explicit appeal from the United States Government to refrain from naming the countries involved.9The Washington Post’s staff writer Dana Priest, who wrote the article in question, explained the rationale behind the newspaper’s decision in the following terms: “Political embarrassment was not a consideration; it really turned on the safety and co-operation questions. We did not publish the names of the countries involved because those countries were cooperating on other efforts that were not controversial, some of which the Post knew about from independent sources and which we considered to be valuable. Knowing those efforts to be vital to our international programmes, we thought that those efforts might stop if the countries’ names were published, and that this would not be good.”10 33. While one might understand this decision, I have chosen to adopt a different position from that of The Washington Post on this issue, whilst maintaining a strict policy of confidentiality with regard to my individual sources. It should also be borne in mind that the very earnest international NGO Human Rights Watch had explicitly cited Poland and Romania among the countries in which there had been secret detention centres. Moreover, it is difficult to accept that the reasons given at the time by The Washington Post are still valid today. 2.2. The responsibility to provide a truthful account and the importance of confidential sources 34. Especially in light of its unparalleled pedigree for protecting and promoting human rights on our continent, the Council of Europe holds a unique responsibility in providing a truthful account. It has been said that the paradigm of American detainee treatment in the course of the “war on terror” has been to carry out its most odious acts extra-territorially – including in Europe – because it knows that such acts would not be permissible at home under the laws and Constitution of the United States. This is a paradigm of political expediency. But how not to see in it a form of contempt towards other countries, notably Cuba (Guantánamo!) and Europe: what is not good enough for the United States is for others! 35. In direct response, the paradigm of this report is one based on principles and values. We assert that in order to retain the moral authority necessary to defeat the global terrorist threat, we must ensure that every detainee in our custody – notwithstanding the acts of which he is accused, or whether he is held in Europe or 6. See Dick Marty, Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, “Alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states”, Doc. 10957, 12 June 2006, available at: http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-DocDetails-EN.asp?fileid=11527 (hereinafter “Marty report 2006, Council of Europe Doc. 10957”). 7. Remarks by President Bush, 6 September 2006, supra note 3. 8. See Dana Priest, “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons – Debate is Growing within Agency about Legality and Morality of Overseas System set up after 9/11”, The Washington Post, 2 November 2005. 9. See Howard Kurtz, “Bush Presses Editors on Security”, The Washington Post, 26 December 2005, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/25/AR2005122500665_pf.html. For further commentary, see also Marty report 2006, Section 1.3, at p. 9. 10. Dana Priest, speaking at the seminar entitled “Secrecy and Government: America Faces the Future”, hosted by the Center on Law and Security, NYU School of Law, New York, 12 April 2007. 10