The Clipboard: US ran Guantanamo-style prison in Kosovo - Council of Europe envoy

From an article¹:

The US military ran a Guantanamo Bay-type detention centre in Kosovo, a top Council of Europe official said.

The Council of Europe's Human rights commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles said he had been 'shocked' by conditions at the barbed wire-rimmed centre inside a US military base, which he witnessed in 2002.

The camp resembled 'a smaller version of Guantanamo', he told France's Le Monde newspaper, referring to the US centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of terrorism suspects remain detained without trial. (link)

Via this Daily Kos diary and its comments, we find that Camp Bondsteel was a concern to European human rights groups as early as January 2002 because of existing beyond the law (which initially led it to be compared to Guantanamo) and because of allegations of torture there in December 2001. And the German newspaper Der Spiegel earlier this month speculated (in light of the Washington Post story) that Camp Bondsteel was a likely site for one of the CIA black sites (how could they resist a place that was already under control of the U.S. military, set up with a prison, and beyond the law?)

The original Le Monde article (in French) is here.

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Complete text of the article, US ran Guantanamo-style prison in Kosovo - Council of Europe envoy, by AFX News, Ltd.

The US military ran a Guantanamo Bay-type detention centre in Kosovo, a top Council of Europe official said.

The Council of Europe's Human rights commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles said he had been 'shocked' by conditions at the barbed wire-rimmed centre inside a US military base, which he witnessed in 2002.

The camp resembled 'a smaller version of Guantanamo', he told France's Le Monde newspaper, referring to the US centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of terrorism suspects remain detained without trial.

Gil-Robles told the daily he had inspected the centre, located within the US military's Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, in 2002, to investigate reports of extrajudicial arrests by NATO-led peacekeepers.

Gil-Robles said he had no evidence that Camp Bondsteel was linked to the alleged CIA operations.

'But I do believe that an explanation should be given for this base in Kosovo, as for other potentially suspect sites' in Europe, he told the paper.

Earlier this week the Council of Europe, which guarantees human rights in its 46 member states, launched an investigation into the alleged prisons.

The official leading the probe said Friday that Romania, which rights groups have labelled a likely site for one of the secret centres, was not hosting a large, Guantanamo-style jail.

Dick Marty told a press conference in Bucharest that he was 'convinced that there are no Guantanamos in Romania'.

However, he did not exclude the possibility of Romania having 'small centres with one or two detainees being kept temporarily for interrogation'.

reference=http://www.forbes.com/work/feeds/afx/2005/11/25/afx2354167.html