Russia slams US for secret prisons on foreign lands

 

A small plane taxis at a Polish airport used to ferry terrorism suspects in and out of Poland where the CIA ran a secret prison. (File photo)

Source: Press TV

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/10/20/267700/russia-blasts-us-for-secret-prisons/

Russia has launched a broadside on the United States for running secret jails in a variety of countries across the globe.

In a document revealed by RIA Novosti on Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry noted that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is running prisons in Poland, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Thailand, Lithuania and Romania.

The report, which the ministry has submitted to the lower house of Russian State Duma for deliberations, denounced the US for its dismal human rights record, citing molestation of children, invasion of privacy, brutality of police and restrictions on the freedom of expression.

The report noted that “hundreds of thousands of children” are maltreated in the US every year, leading to 1,600 deaths in 2010 alone.

“About one police officer in 100 has been involved in criminal abuses, including sexual harassment, indecent behavior or rape,” it said.

“The US remains the country with the largest prison population in the world - 2.2 million,” the report underlined.

The Russian report also heaped scorn on a US legislation authorizing “special services” to keep a tab on all private electronic messages without any judicial order. “Between 2004 and 2007 the number of electronic messages monitored by US special services rose by 3,000 percent.”

Former US president George Bush, together with a number of other high-ranking US officials, approved the establishment of secret prisons in foreign lands, as early as 2002, by its key spy agency in efforts to carry out harsh interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, to extract information from what they introduced as ‘terror suspects’.

The establishment of such interrogation facilities in foreign, allied nations by the US administration was to avert accountability in the American legal system, since torture is specifically banned by the US Constitution.