Marcin Grajewski from Brussels for Reuters reports: Dissident U.S. intelligence officers angry at former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped a European probe uncover details of secret CIA prisons in Europe, the top investigator said on Tuesday.
Swiss Senator Dick Marty, author of a Council of Europe report on the jails, said senior CIA officials disapproved of Rumsfeld's methods in hunting down terrorist suspects, and had agreed to talk to him on condition of anonymity.
"There were huge conflicts between the CIA and Rumsfeld. Many leading figures in the CIA did not accept these methods at all," Marty told European Parliament committees, defending his work against complaints it was based on unnamed sources.
The report issued last month said the Central Intelligence Agency ran secret jails in Poland and Romania, with the complicity of those governments, and transported terrorist suspects across Europe in secret flights.
Poland and Romania have repeatedly denied hosting CIA prisons on their soil.
"People in the CIA felt these things were not consonant with the sort of intelligence work they normally do," Marty said.
(…)
"The Americans themselves admitted there were secret prisons, that they abducted people from the streets, that people were handed over to countries like Syria, Yemen, Egypt where they were tortured," he said.
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