You have to wonder whether any of this will ever come home to roost for the Bush Administration and whether these European governments are just spinning their wheels. I mean, what's the liklihood that anyone from the CIA will ever be turned over?
Story below is from the Washington Post, though it is not yet on their website.
By Craig Whitlock
The Washington Post
BERLIN -- Several European governments have opened investigations into a fleet of CIA-operated airplanes that have crisscrossed the continent hundreds of times in recent years. The aim is to determine whether U.S. officials secretly used local airports and military bases to transfer terrorism suspects under conditions that violate local and international treaties.
This week, officials in Spain, Sweden, Norway and in the European Parliament said they had either opened formal inquiries or demanded answers from U.S. officials about CIA flights, in response to growing public opposition in Europe to U.S. anti-terrorism tactics.
In other countries, criminal probes have deepened into the alleged kidnapping of terrorism suspects by the CIA. In Italy, prosecutors last week filed a formal extradition request for 22 U.S. citizens alleged to be CIA operatives who are charged with kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003 and flying him to his native Egypt, where he said he was tortured.
A German prosecutor said Wednesday that he had opened a separate criminal investigation involving the same abduction to examine whether the CIA broke German laws by first bringing the cleric to Ramstein Air Base and forcibly detaining him there before putting him on a CIA-chartered plane to Egypt.