AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
Brussels: NATO rejected allegations on Wednesday that a detention facility it shared with the US military at a base in Kosovo was used as a secret prison by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
“We have no doubt that the facility meets and has always met appropriate standards,” a spokesman told reporters at alliance headquarters in Brussels.
He said all people detained at Camp Bondsteel in the east of the Serbian province had frequent access to visitors, their lawyers and the Red Cross.
He added that the former commander of the NATO-led peacekeeping mission, KFOR, had said that “unless he was deaf and blind there was no one in that facility except those detained under the authority of KFOR.”
The US military has denied having such a prison at the base.
Council of Europe human rights commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles said last week that the US military ran a Guantanamo-type detention centre there.
He said he had been “shocked” by conditions at the barbed wire-rimmed centre, which he witnessed in 2002.
The camp resembled “a smaller version of Guantanamo”, Gil-Robles told France's Le Monde newspaper, referring to the US centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of terror suspects are detained without trial.
