IN early March, the tribunal created by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and named after him met in Barcelona. It was originally constituted to judge the war crimes committed in Vietnam, and subsequently in Latin America, and other lamentable situations around the world. This time, the Russell Tribunal issued a ruling on the European Union, finding it guilty of failing to influence Israel in order to prevent the launch of Operation Cast Lead which, from December 2008 to January 2009, caused the deaths of 1,412 Palestinians and destroyed the scant infrastructure of the Gaza Strip. The testimony of Belgian Euro Deputy Véronique de Keyser, member of the Flemish Socialist Party, revealed in those sessions that the European Commission knew beforehand about the plan to bombard Gaza, because former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni had personally communicated Tel Aviv’s military intentions during a meeting with the EU Foreign Affairs Commission. That body, far from trying to avert the military operation, agreed to strengthen its ties with Israel. For that reason, this moral court, comprising prominent individuals from very diverse tendencies and creeds, considers the EU to be complicit in the massacre.
That outcome inevitably leads one to the assumption that if the countries that currently make up the EU had had a "common position" of pressure and criticism with respect to the Pinochet coup in Chile in the 1970s, or to any of the dictatorships in the American Southern Cone, it is possible that those illegitimate, bloody, dehumanized processes would not have lasted so long.
With the honorable exception of countries like Olof Palme’s Sweden, the allegedly hyper-democratic parliamentary deputies of the Parliament that brings together representatives of the European Community in ideological groups that profess such concern about right and wrong, did not oppose with the necessary force the U.S-authorized barbarity in those countries. These are not irrelevant events, because what occurred in Honduras last year confirms the duplicity or moral weakness of those who utilize the big stick and falsification against persons in their sights, based on their own decision or as part of the pro-empire (read USA) chorus.
An initial impulse prompted them to condemn the kidnapping of Zelaya and the usurpation of his post, but they did not hesitate to follow the steps oriented by Hillary Clinton and right-wing extremists in the United States, and proceeded to withdraw the timid sanctions they had announced. They repeated the permissiveness shown toward Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Central American nations in the 1970s and 80s, when in all of those countries people were being disappeared, tortured or killed, including Americans and European citizens.
Except for one or two trials, almost always promoted by relatives, and in a bilateral context, there was no condemnation of usurpers who forcibly removed from power governments elected in the sacrosanct Western style of representative democracy, nor was there any condemnation (or not with the necessary force) of the inexcusable events that continue to affect thousands of families 30 years later. Because, while some at least recovered their grandchildren, many were not even able to bury the bodies of their loved ones who were thrown into the sea or into communal, Nazi-style graves. That is something that is being uncovered today in Colombia, and admitted by the paramilitary killers themselves, without anybody in Europe being scandalized.

Giving an example of his formulation, the prominent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor said that in the last 60 years, the CIA employed up to "one billion dollars per year" for its reprehensible methods of obtaining information by inflicting unbearable pain on its victims. Those methods were preferably employed outside of the United States, and the most famous facilities for such practices were the secret prisons set up by George Bush Jr. in Europe, where they were tolerated by the local governments.
A November 2, 2005 article in the Washington Post was the first to refer to the fact that the CIA were holding suspected members of Al Qaeda in various Eastern European, Asian and Middle Eastern countries. These "black sites," as they were called at the time, emerged after September 11, 2001, and the stopovers made in various countries by U.S. planes transporting those individuals, deprived of all their rights, caught the attention of European civic organizations, which exposed them.
When the matter assumed scandalous proportions, was charged by the European Council instructed the Swiss senator Richard Marty to head up an investigative commission on the issue. His first report appeared nine months later (June 2006), and stated that 14 European nations, including Switzerland, were actively or passively involved in the detention and transfer of those prisoners. A second finding exhaustively backed what had been confirmed.
In late 2007, Bush defended the CIA’s methods, just as Richard Cheney did 12 months ago, and as Karl Rove – the power behind the throne of the Republican administration and one of the devisers of the kidnapping/torture/murder network justified by the attacks on the World Trade Center – has just done this March, in an interview with the BBC. This is an individual capable of insisting on the usefulness of torture and of affirming with pride that he had created a legal framework for that abhorrent practice.
Precedents of the implementation of psychological and physical punishment date are much older, but it was in the 1950s that it became systematic. According to authorized studies, what was uncovered in the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, had already been put into practice in other locations – Latin America, for example. In no case has Europe reacted vigorously to those acts of perversion.
It would seem that researcher Allan Nairn, considered by various eminent U.S. figures to be serious, objective and courageous, had those precedents in mind when he said: "What Obama’s (ban on torture) cancels is merely that small percentage of torture that is not being engaged in by Americans, but it maintains the overwhelming entirety of torture as a system, employed by foreigners under U.S. patronage."
He was referring both to soldiers trained in places like the School of the Americas by gendarmes acquired in occupied countries, and mercenaries who, as "contractors," take charge of dirty work, such as inflicting suffering on defenseless human beings.
Barack Obama suspended the application of torture shortly after becoming president, but he did not proceed to punish the guilty, thus leaving intact the systems that continue to function both inside and outside the country.
On March 10 in Geneva, Manfred Nowak, UN special rapporteur on torture, criticized the U.S. president for that very reason, accusing him of not having investigated charges of torture under the Bush administration, despite the fact that the United States, as a signatory to the International Convention on Torture, has legal responsibilities requiring an exhaustive investigation and bringing the guilty to justice.
The fact that Karl Rove, smiling and sarcastic, can venture to say that he doesn’t care that weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq and, with murderous vehemence, has defended the use of torture as a method for obtaining questionable revelations, indicates that Nowak is right.

RANCID EUROPE

Nowak is an Austrian attorney who, as the UN special rapporteur, has visited various prisons throughout the world, including those of certain prominent countries. Last year he informed the media that several nations had refused to allow him to examine their prisons. In any event, he discovered that approximately 10 million people were being held in unacceptable conditions. "The majority of them are in conditions that violate human dignity," he affirmed. One million of that total comprised children aged 9 to 10, who were detained with adults, subject to diverse abuse or beatings by the jailers themselves as a method of "disciplining them."

International organizations have confirmed these extreme findings and refer, moreover, to the detention of immigrants, because the European Union has 180 prisons for holding foreigners without documents, in addition to those imprisoned in ordinary jails.

The problems with prisons in Europe are many, according to another report, reflecting overpopulation and lack of hygiene, in addition to insufficient personnel and a lack of safety, including sexual attacks, issues that are touched only by the alternative media. In 2008, these irregularities prompted several hundred prison officials to demonstrate outside the Council of Ministers in Brussels to protest those anomalies, which also lead to a high rate of suicide. Prison suicides occur above all in the United Kingdom, Norway, France and Slovenia, according to the study.

The above is deplorable, as is the content of an Amnesty International dossier: "The role played by some European states in secret handovers and detentions has wavered between ‘active participation and tacit connivance.’ European agents have detained or held suspects and left them under the custody of the United States without any legal process. They directly participated in illegal arrests; in one case, helping U.S. agents kidnap a suspect in the middle of the street in Italy before his extraordinary handover to Egypt. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has freely used European airports to operate aircraft which transported victims of extraordinary handovers, hooded and chained, with the aim of subjecting them to interrogation and abuse while they were held incommunicado in secret prisons all over the world, including Europe. Agents of European states took advantage of the illegal detention of some of the individuals held to interrogate them without doing anything to alert their families as to their whereabouts or to try to solve the illegal detention, which in and of itself constitutes a human rights violation.