The rhetoric of secret prisons

In an article entitled "US accused of using gangster tactics over terror suspects," the UK Guardian announces the publication of a report by the Council of Europe on the alleged secret CIA prisons in Europe.

Here is the headline and the first paragraph of the article:

US accused of using gangster tactics over terror suspects

· Washington 'outsourced torture', says senator
· Critics attack lack of evidence in report

Nicholas Watt in Strasbourg
Wednesday January 25, 2006
Europe's human rights watchdog accused Washington yesterday of using "gangster tactics" by flying in terrorist suspects to countries where they would face torture, and criticised European countries who appear to have done nothing to intervene.

Read the continuation of the article here.

Compare this article to the New York Times, which today also features an article about Marty's report:

Europe's C.I.A. Inquiry Finds No Evidence of Secret Prisons

By CRAIG S. SMITH
Published: January 25, 2006
STRASBOURG, France, Jan. 24 - An inquiry by the Council of Europe into allegations that the C.I.A. has operated secret detention centers in Eastern Europe has turned up no evidence that such centers ever existed, though the leader of the inquiry, Dick Marty, said there are enough "indications" to justify continuing the investigation.

More here.

Note the difference between the two pieces. Whereas the Guardian emphasizes the accusations leveled against the U.S., the New York Times focuses on the absence of evidence. The use of quotation marks is especially telling here. The absence of evidence does not seem to require quotation marks, even though it is lifted from a quote by Marty, that appears at the bottom of the article - he says: "At this stage of the investigations, there is no formal, irrefutable evidence of the existence of secret C.I.A. detention centers in Romania, Poland or any other country". However, when it comes to the indications that such secret prisons exist, the Times prefers to put it in quotation marks, as to mark the different level of veracity between the "indications" and the evidence. But recall that the presence of indications and the absence of "formal, irrefutable evidence" are both part of the testimony by Marty to the Council of Europe. On the level of truth content and reliability, they are thus strictly equivalent. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the presence of indications is any less reliable than the absence of evidence, unless of course one is generally inclined to trust the CIA more than the Council of Europe, when it come to the protection of human rights.

In this context, it is perhaps worth remembering that the Council of Europe is not a political body and is not part of the institutions of the European Union. Indeed, it is basically a human rights watchdog. Its tasks are to defend human rights, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. The same can hardly be said of the CIA.