Today’s report from the Council of Europe’s investigator, former Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty, can be found here, along with a timeline of the investigation, and supporting documentation in the form of flight logs for the “extraordinary renditions” to and from the prisons.

Here are some excerpts from the report, which is long, detailed, and cries out for the kind of analysis we’re doing on Justice Department email:

What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice. Others have been held in arbitrary detention, without any precise charges levelled against them and without any judicial oversight – denied the possibility of defending themselves. Still others have simply disappeared for indefinite periods and have been held in secret prisons, including in member states of the Council of Europe, the existence and operations of which have been concealed ever since.

Estimates of the numbers held range from 8,000 to 35,000, with Colin Powell’s chief-of-staff Lawrence Wilkerson’s estimate at the high end.

Some individuals were kept in secret detention centres for periods of several years, where they were subjected to degrading treatment and so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (essentially a euphemism for a kind of torture), in the name of gathering information, however unsound, which the United States claims has protected our common security. Elsewhere, others have been transferred thousands of miles into prisons whose locations they may never know, interrogated ceaselessly, physically and psychologically abused, before being released because they were plainly not the people being sought.

And the European governments are resisting accountability just as much as Bush does, what a surprise:

Some European governments have obstructed the search for the truth and are continuing to do so by invoking the concept of “state secrets”. Secrecy is invoked so as not to provide explanations to parliamentary bodies or to prevent judicial authorities from establishing the facts and prosecuting those guilty of offences [Sound familiar?]. This criticism applies to Germany and Italy, in particular. It is striking to note
that state secrets are invoked on grounds almost identical to those advanced by the authorities in the Russian Federation in its crackdown on scientists, journalists and lawyers, many of whom have been prosecuted and sentenced for alleged acts of espionage.

And now we know for sure the countries where the torture camps were:  Read more