Swiss "Onyx" intercepts evidence of U.S. "black sites".

Like most contemporary Western governments, Switzerland has at its disposal a sophisticated electronic surveillance network akin to the National Security Agency's "Echelon" program. Late last year, the Swiss system, known as "Onyx," intercepted an official fax sent by Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit to the country's London embassy discussing "the fate of 23 detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan who were apparently interrogated at the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base in Romania on the Black Sea coast," reported the January 10 London Telegraph. The Egyptian fax, as summarized in the Swiss newspaper Sonntagsblick, observed: "There are similar interrogation centers in Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia, and in Bulgaria."

The intercepted fax constitutes the first "real evidence" that "the US interrogated suspected terrorists at secret prisons in Eastern Europe," observed the Telegraph. Significantly, Egypt is a partner in the Bush administration's practice of "rendition," through which terrorist suspects are delivered by the CIA into the custody of regimes that practice torture (see "Casting Aside Justice" in our August 8, 2005 issue).

The Bush administration has denied reports that it has established interrogation centers in Eastern European prisons once used by the KGB. The Egyptian account--coming as it does from a friendly and collaborating government--offers compelling evidence to the contrary.

It should also be noted that the security services of Romania and Bulgaria were among the KGB's most capable subcontractors in organizing and subsidizing Middle Eastern terrorism. Kosovo, a province of the former Yugoslavia, is at present a UN protectorate governed by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, an Islamo-Leninist terrorist group allied with Osama bin Laden. Thus these "allies" in the war on Islamic terrorism have been actively involved in creating the enemy that now threatens us.