CIA's secret prisons

In a recent interview with a Saudi paper, President General Pervez Musharraf came up with a much welcome assurance regarding US government's renditions policy involving yet another scandal of arbitrary arrests and torture in CIA-run prisons that are located in different countries.
He told the interviewer that there is no presence of US soldiers or secret jails on Pakistani soil. "No agreement," he averred, "has been signed to set up secret jails in the country in collaboration with the US." Sceptics though may want to point out that in the case of countries such as Pakistan where the security agencies practise torture as a matter of routine, there is really no need for secret jails.
In fact, for some time, the US and Britain have come under severe criticism from various human rights organisations for sending alleged terror suspects to Egypt and Syria, the countries where torture against political prisoners is an integral part of the system.
The UN convention against torture and the EU law forbid returning anyone to a country that is known to practise torture. Yet, people have been purposely sent back to such countries.
Currently, there is an uproar in Europe over America's illegal renditions, whereby suspects are abducted and taken, via special flights, to secret CIA-operated jails, mostly in eastern European countries such as Poland and Romania, for detention and questioning through methods that constitute plain torture.
CIA operatives can pick up anyone anywhere in Europe like in the case of German citizen Khalid Masri, who was arrested while boarding a bus in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan to be detained and tortured for several months before his tormentors realised it was a case of mistaken identity.
Masri was arrested because of his name, which resembled that of a wanted man. Many other innocent people may have suffered like him. In fact, it is not uncommon for prisoners to 'admit' crimes they have nothing to do with simply to avoid pain and humiliation.
Hence, the 'information' that is extracted through such means is not very reliable, either. Torture, in any case, is dehumanising and therefore an abhorrence for all civilised people.
During her recent visit to Europe, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was confronted by the media with the issue of illegal renditions. She did not confirm or deny the existence of secret prisons, apparently because she realised that the scandal might not remain under cover for long.
As expected, she tried to justify US high-handed policy vis-à-vis arresting suspects, contending that it had helped save lives in Europe as well. And, of course, she pretended Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo did not exist, also ignoring that the US had acknowledged denying the Red Cross access to suspects held in its jails, as she went on to say that her country does not believe in or connive at torture.
As for the countries that are known to have provided secret facilities to the US for inhuman treatment of suspects, they publicly maintain that they had no knowledge of such activities, let alone signing up agreements for the setting up of secret prisons for torture.
It is hard to believe that they did not know about these goings-on unless their intelligence services were utterly worthless, in which case the governments involved should be talking about big shake-ups in their security network.