Update: The story is now online.

When somebody beat them to this approach by nearly a month, the response was predictable — although the Cabinet Office admitted holding the requested information, they refused disclosure based on the section 27 (detrimental to international relations) exemption to FOIA.

But Newsnight tonight reported that a Downing Street spokesman responded to questions about al-Jazeera’s request by denying that the document contained any reference to bombing al-Jazeera.

I suspect that when it comes 19 working days from now, the formal FOIA response will look a lot like the one Steve Wood received last month (PDF).

Former parliamentary researcher Leo O’Connor and former government communications official David Keogh are facing charges over the leak. The trial date was set yesterday with little fanfare. The New York Times today reports:

Neil Clark, a lawyer for Mr. O’Connor, said he was shown the memo for the first time on Tuesday on condition that he discuss it only with his client. But, Mr. Clark said, he would seek the disclosure of the document in court. “I didn’t think there was anything in there that could embarrass the British government,” he said.

Hundreds of bloggers have vowed to defy reporting restrictions by publishing the document if it comes into their possession. So far has not been seen publically. Even the Daily Mirror’s Kevin Maguire, who broke the story, based his account entirely on the recollections of individuals who had seen the document.

Yesterday, we learned that Labour MPs Tony Clarke and Peter Kilfoyle had in October 2004 revealed the contents of the document to a British expatriate in California, John Latham. Although they admit this violation of the Official Secrets Act, they are not facing charges.

At least 176 flights into or out of Scotland have already been logged by aircraft owned or run by the CIA. The airfields involved include Glasgow, Prestwick, Edinburgh, Leuchars, Wick and Inverness. The new documents also show CIA flights which passed through Danish airspace en route between Scotland and Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.

…

The new flight documents seen by The Scotsman were produced in response to a request from a Danish MP, Frank Aaen, who wrote to the foreign minister Per Stig Moeller in August requesting the flight plans for all suspected CIA flights passing through Danish airspace. The foreign minister’s reply revealed 12 of the 14 flights made by CIA plane N379P through Danish airspace originated in, or were bound for, Scotland.

The plane, a Gulfstream V turbojet, travelled on 12 separate occasions to destinations including Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, countries with notorious human rights records and where CIA agents are suspected to have taken terror suspects for questioning outside the controls of international law. The Danish government has since banned CIA flights from the country’s airspace.

The flight plans record the arrival of a flight in Glasgow from Uzbekistan on 14 December, 2001.

Four days later, the same plane landed in Sweden, where, in a case that was extensively documented by Swedish media, two Egyptian terror suspects, Muhammed al-Zery and Ahmed Agiza, were arrested and deported to Egypt for questioning, where both claim to have been tortured.

According to the Danish documents, another suspected CIA plane left Prestwick on 7 February, 2005, passing through Danish airspace en route for Baghdad.

European governments’s knowledge — and possible acquiescence — in the rendition programme is rightly high on the agenda with Condoleezza Rice in Europe facing questions about the flights.

With the ACLU suing CIA on behalf of the wrongly abducted German citizen Khaled al-Masri, A Fistful of Europe asks exactly the right question about the German government: “What did Schily know, and when did he know it?”

The Washington Post certainly suggests the former German interior minister he knew quite a lot about al-Masri’s case as early as May 2004.

…A greater potential downside of the Bush team’s walk on the “dark side” is the fraying of the international coalition of intelligence services — including those in Europe — that have been cooperating in unprecedented ways. This solidarity is one of the unsung successes of the last four years and a key reason why there has been no second terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11. Countries that may publicly poke a finger in Uncle Sam’s eye can still work with him hand-in-glove behind the scenes. France, whose opposition to Washington’s Iraq policy requires no précis, hosts a secret joint operations center with the CIA in Paris called Alliance Base, and has a relationship with the Agency that would astonish the “freedom fries” crowd.

European intelligence services will want to preserve this cooperation, but the issue will not be theirs alone to decide. As public revulsion with U.S. practices grows, European political leaders may yet be forced to restrict intelligence cooperation — perhaps not immediately, but soon. In that case, the Bush Administration’s lack of self-restraint will exact a cost in greater insecurity we will all have to pay.

Swiss Senator Dick Marty hasasked US Senator John Kerry to be informed of any future report on alleged secret CIA detention facilities in Europe, according to the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel:

The Council of Europe’s investigator already submitted a discreet request to the office of Democratic Senator John Kerry, who proposed the amendment, asking for information on the outcome of the report. Meanwhile, however, Marty can at least look forward to receiving informal help. In light of the heated debate over torture in Washington, the prospects of keeping the highly confidential report under wraps are slim.

The Washington Post reported that a network of secret CIA detention centres included facilities in Eastern Europe. Marty is investigating the claims for the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, while Kerry led the American Senate’s call for the Bush administration to issue a report on the “black sites”.

A leak may be necessary, because Marty is pessimistic about cooperation from the Bush administration, according to Reuters:

“It doesn’t seem like the U.S. government is helping us in this case,” said Marty …

“They can’t confirm or deny. They say they are at war, so it will be difficult to obtain information from their side,” he told reporters on Friday.

“It’s a pity , because a certain transparency would be to the advantage of everybody, including the U.S.”

Marty has so far found no evidence of “black sites” in Europe, but is investigating 31 alleged “extraordinary rendition” flights that landed in Europe. He has asked Eurosat for satellite imagry of sites in Poland and Romania and wants the air-traffic control body Eurocontrol to hand over records of the 31 planes’ movements.

The Handelsblatt reported that CIA sources had confirmed the existance of two secret prisons in Poland and Romania. There were additional sites in other European countries, the sources told the German business daily. Former Romanian president Ion Iliescu denied any involvement of his government in dentention facilities at Mihail Kogalniceanu air base, which were used by the US military during the Afghanistand and Iraq campaigns.

In addition, the former president said the CIA secret prisons issue is nothing more than a “diversion”. “It is an American dispute and Romania is one of the collateral victims. The U.S. and Romania authorities have never talked about this issue,” said Iliescu.

He also said that if the prisons exist, it means they were build without the authorities’ knowledge. “However, this possibility should not theoretically exist,” added Iliescu.

Handelsblatt also reported that CIA is still using European airports for stop-overs for its “extraordinary rendition” flights. CIA flights landed in the airbase at Ramstein and at Frankfurt airport, the paper reported, citing a high-ranking CIA official. Over the weekend, the Berliner Zeitung reported that at CIA flights have landed in Europe at least 15 times since the beginning of 2005.

The issue is also not going away in other European countries.

Handelsblatt also reports that Austria’s opposition has called on the government to make a formal complaint with President George W. Bush. Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel visits Washington on 8 December.

Cyrprus’ Foreign Minister George Iacovou said he knew nothing of CIA planes landing in his country. Meanwhile, more evidence has emerged that some of the flights landed in Malta, according to the Malta Independent on Sunday:

Ongoing investigations by this newspaper into the use of Malta’s airport and airspace by the CIA have revealed the presence of another suspected plane — a Lockheed L-100 Hercules with tail number N8213G, which stopped over in Malta on 31 March 2004 and again on 25 August of the same year.

The Hercules is the latest plane implicated in extraordinary rendition and has been reported to have made several stops in Scandinavia. The Hercules, the largest of the CIA planes spotted in Malta, has space for cargo and about 100 passengers.

While the Boeing 737 and the Gulfstream are relatively nondescript aircraft, the Hercules carries a large ‘Prescott’ logo on its side. The private planes being used by the CIA are owned by shell companies and the Prescott Support company is widely believed to be one of the several companies serving as covers for the CIA’s clandestine prisoner transports.

Le Monde, meanwhile, reported that Council of Europe human rights commissioner Alvaro Gil Robles had seen a dentention facility at Camp Bondseel, the US base near Pristina, Kosovo that resembed “a smaller version of Guantánamo”, although he did not suggest they were linked to the “black sites” charge.

Andrew Tyrie (Conservative), Sir Menzies Campbell (Lib Dem) and Foreign Office minister Chris Mullin (Labour) are leading the effort.

While the UK government is strangely silent on CIA flights stopping over on its own soil, other European countries are more concerned about the practice, leading to rather strange situation reported by the Associated Press:

Britain has agreed to write to the United States on behalf of the European Union requesting clarification of reports of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, a diplomat said Tuesday.

Britain, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, was asked by several nations including Finland and the Netherlands to write the letter during a EU foreign ministers meeting Monday, the European diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (which, contrary to some headlines, is not an EU body despite confusingly using the same flag) is also looking into CIA rendition flights and their connection to the alleged CIA “black site” prisons in Eastern Europe.

Swiss liberal senator Dick Marty, who is leading the COE parliamentarians’ investigation, says that he has no proof of the existance of the “black sites”, but is investigating 31 flights that landed in Europe and seeking satellite images of sites in Romania and Poland.

… Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, informed newspapers editors including that of The Times that “publication of a document that has been unlawfully disclosed by a Crown servant could be in breach of Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act.”

…

Under a front-page headline “Bush plot to bomb his ally” in the Daily Mirror yesterday, a secret minute of the conversation in April 2004 records the President allegedly suggesting that he would like to bomb the channel’s studios in Doha, capital of Qatar. …

According to the Mirror, the transcript turned up in the office of former Labour MP Tony Clarke, who lost his Northampton South seat in May.

And guess what, two people have already been charged under the Official Secrets Act for leaking the document:

Last week, Leo O’Connor, a former researcher for Mr Clarke, was charged with receiving a document under section 5 of the act. David Keogh, a former Foreign Office official seconded to the Cabinet Office, was charged last week with making a “damaging disclosure of a document relating to international relations”. Mr Keogh, 49, is accused of sending the document to Mr O’Connor, 42, between April 16 and May 28 2004.

And CNN has the official denial:

“We are not going to dignify something so outlandish with a response,” a White House official told CNN. A Pentagon official called the Daily Mirror report “absolutely absurd.”

Al-Jazeera said it wanted to be “absolutely sure” the memo cited in the report is genuine and urged 10 Downing Street to confirm the information if true.

If the memo is accurate, the network’s statement said, “it would be incumbent on them to explain their positions on statements regarding the deliberate targeting of journalists and news organizations.”

Downing Street spokesman Ian Gleeson said Blair’s office would have no comment since the memo the Daily Mirror cited is the subject of court action.

It seems the contents of the document are “outlandish” enough to warrnet a very public prosecution a civil servant and a Parliamentary aide for leaking it.

Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, an Egyptian native known as Abu Omar was a member of the radical Muslim group Jamaat al-Islamiya, but had been granted political asylum in Italy.

Abu Omar was under surviellance by Italian police, but suddenly disappeared on 17 February 2003, apparently due to an “extraordinary rendition” operation in which the CIA transported him back to Egypt, where he remains in prison and claims to have been tortured.

The European Commision is investigating a report in Wednesday’s Washington Post that a secret network of CIA prisons for terror suspects includes sites in Europe.

Citing US and foreign officals, the Post says that that for more than four years, the CIA has run a “covert prison system” with sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan, a small centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba — and “several democracies in Eastern Europe”.

The European sites are said to be ex-Soviet installations. The Post knows which European states are involved, but witheld them at the request of US authorities who fear terrorist reprisals.

If the reports are true, the secret jails would violate European human rights law, a fact that could have serious consequences, according to the Daily Telegraph:

… The justice commissioner, Franco Frattini, made clear that potentially severe legal and political consequences awaited any EU country, or any country seeking EU membership, if it was confirmed that its government had co-operated with the CIA programme.

…

Mr Frattini said that all member states “are bound” by international legal obligations, in particular the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the Convention against Torture. In theory, nations can be suspended from the EU for grave breaches of such fundamental principles.

While a country of the size and standing of Poland is unlikely to be expelled, the dangers are acute for countries trying to join the EU.

So which European country might be involved? The Guardian’s report is representative of the speculation:

Poland and Romania are thought the most likely locations in Europe, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch and Polish press reports.

…

Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria have denied involvement. The Czech interior minister, Frantiszek Bublan, said the US had approached Prague to build a camp but the request was turned down.

Bulgaria and Romania are scheduled to join the European Union in 2007 and are compelled to sign up to EU human rights standards. Eight other former Soviet bloc nations, including the Czech Republic and Poland, became members in May 2004.

Eastern European Nato members have been some of Washington’s staunchest allies in the “war on terror” and in Iraq.

The paper also suggests a motive for cooperating with the CIA:

…analysts pointed to the feverish competition among the east Europeans to host new US military bases.

The region’s new Nato members, particularly Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, have been among Washington’s staunchest allies in the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, heightening speculation that they would be the likeliest venues for the secret jails. Romania and Bulgaria made military facilities available to the Americans for the Afghan and Iraq wars. The Pentagon is planning to dispatch 5,000 servicemen to a string of new bases in the two countries from next year.

The Independent has a bit more detail, from Human Rights Watch’s investigation into the movements of a Boeing 757 with the tail number N313P, one of the aircraft known to be involved in “extraordinary rendition” flights:

…in September 2003, it flew directly from Kabul to Szymany airport, near the remote Polish town of Szczytno, north of Warsaw, home to a training facility for the Polish intelligence service.

From there, the plane flew directly to Mihail Kogalniceanu air base, close to the Romanian city of Constanta on the Black Sea coast. The Pentagon is involved in negotiations to take over the airbase’s operation. Throughout 2004, the plane made a number of other visits to Kogalniceanu, on which the US has spent at least $3m upgrading facilities in preparation for taking it over.

In 2003 Kogalniceanu was used as the temporary location for more than 3,500 US troops on their way to northern Iraq.

The Post’s decision not to name names is proving controvertial. The Columbia Journalism Review’s blog, for example, quotes foreign policy analyst Peter Kornbluh:

“This is probably the most important newspaper capitulation since [the New York Times] yielded to JFK’s call for them not to run the full story of planning for the Bay of Pigs. By withholding the country names, the Post is directly enabling the rendition, secret detention, and torture of prisoners at these locations to continue. That is a ghastly responsibility.”

CJR itself is more charitable, sugggesting that the Post may have deliberatly allowed itself to be scoopted on an important aspect of the story:

To Kornbluh, it’s moot that the Financial Times came along and filled in the holes the Post left in its account. We’re not so sure. The editors of the Post have been around the block a few times; they must have known it was inevitable that this information would come out. From outside looking in, it appears their motive was not to keep the information secret, but rather to avoid being the first to expose the location of the “black sites.”

What we do know is that the Post is trying to have it both ways: Getting credit for breaking the story, without breaking the specific details that might have caused it grief from the CIA.

Which raises an old question: Is it the job of a newspaper to tell us what it knows — or to bend over backwards to hide information from us?

It seems like a reasonable analysis. In the age of the Internet, where interested readers can easily turn to other sources from around the world, perhaps all that matters is getting the core of a story onto the grid. The full(er) picture was clearly going to emerge in other papers’ follow-up stories within hours. Negotiating and retaining access to sources, particularly in the intelligence community, is an important aspect of journalism. If your goal is to get information that is in the public interest out in the open, maintaining those relationships is sometimes more important than stating what should be fairly obvious to intelligent readers.

EUObserver quotes a speech by the former Irish prime minister:

“They don’t see every problem as an existential crisis”, he said adding that Europeans tend to believe the “bicycle theory” whereby if the Union stops going forward it will fall over.

He makes some other interesting observations, too:

“Americans are not ignorant about Europe and many have a very deep knowledge of Europe. They are interested in what we are doing” …

The relaunched Guardian has a big feature about the UK’s role in “extraordinary renditions” — CIA flights that take terror suspects for interrogation in friendly third countries with dubious human rights records.

Precise numbers are impossible to determine. A report on renditions published by New York University school of law and the New York City Bar Association (PDF) suggests that around 150 people have been “rendered” in the last four years, but that is only an estimate. A handful have emerged from what has been labelled a secret gulag, and have given deeply disturbing accounts of horrific mistreatment.

Previous media reports have uncovered sketchy details of a British link to CIA abduction operations, but the full extent of the UK’s support can now be revealed. Drawing on publicly available information from the US Federal Aviation Administration, the Guardian has compiled a database of flight records which shows the extent of British logistical support.

Aircraft involved in the operations have flown into the UK at least 210 times since 9/11, an average of one flight a week. The 26-strong fleet run by the CIA have used 19 British airports and RAF bases, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Birmingham, Luton, Bournemouth and Belfast. The favourite destination is Prestwick, which CIA aircraft have flown into and out from more than 75 times. Glasgow has seen 74 flights, and RAF Northolt 33.

Denmark recently banned CIA rendition flights from its airspace.

The Guardian illustrates its feature with pictures of a U.S. military transport plane of a type thought to be used for renditions. But chartered private jets are also thought to be used in the practice, including one owned by the owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball team and a Gulfstream V with the fuselage number N379P.

The practice, known as extraordinary rendition, involves CIA-chartered private jets used to transport suspects to friendly regimes that are more open to using torture in investigations than liberal democracies.

The RCN has been conducting “Arctic sovereignty patrols” in the nippy region. In July, the RCN planted a flag on Hans Island, and the Canadian defense minister Bill Graham later made an unannounced visit, prompting protests from Copenhagen, which dispatched its own naval ships to region. Before things got ugly, the two countries decided to settle the dispute at the United Nations.

Now Canada is set to use a privatly-owned satellite to monitor the Arctic north, according to ministerial briefing notes obtained by the Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, Candada’s Freedom of Information legislation:

Canada will be spending C$400m on images from the Radarsat 2 satellite, which will be launched next summer:

Passing over the North Pole 14 times daily, recording images of ships, aircraft — even pollution — at a rate of 3,000 square kilometres per second, it will be the linchpin in the Canadian military’s Project Polar Epsilon.

The documents insist that “Polar Epsilon has no connection to the U.S. ballistic missile defence program.”

Update: Here’s a post putting all this into context from the Canadian position.

This has even been a problem in the United States. As Julian Sanchez reports in Reason, it’s one of the things legislators are looking to strengthen in America’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA):

One section of the OPEN Government act has already passed the Senate as a stand-alone bill. That law would attempt to eliminate “stealth exemptions” to FOIA by requiring Congress to explicitly identify any statues that would limit the public’s right to access information under FOIA. [Lucy] Dalglish, explains that as the law stands now, “I could spend a year going through the federal code and not know what’s covered. This gives us a warning: If a bill is proposed that limits FOIA, it’s not going to fly under our radar.”

It’s also a problem in the UK, where section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 prohibits any disclosure that “would breach another enactment or would constitute a contempt of court”. It’s an absolute exemption that can’t be overridden by a public interest test.

Unlike the Americans, British lawyers, activists and journalists don’t have to trawl the statute books to find out the true limitations of their FOIA: The Government has done it for them. According to a review (PDF) published earlier this summer by the Department of Constitutional Affairs, there are 210 British laws that bar disclosure under FOIA.

The DCA went to all this trouble for a pretty positive reason: They were looking for secrecy laws that might be worth repealing under Section 75 of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Americans should take a look at Section 75 of the UK FOIA, which allows the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs to Order laws that conflict with government openness. Unfortunatly, its first use only rendered eight secrecy provisions inoperative.

A further 40 have been earmarked to be removed, and another 19 will have had sunset clauses added. (Oh goody. This means you will now be able to get information collected under Schedule 2, paragraph 7 of the Energy Act 1976 after 1985.)

The DCA decided that the remaining 111 secrecy provisions should remain untouched.

The UK, on the other hand, should look at the provisions of the OPEN Government bill that require notification of any “stealth exemption” to FOIA carved out as a result of secrecy provisions in new legislation.

Why? Seven new restrictions on government openness were passed between the day the Freedom of Information Act was passed on 30 November 2000 and the day it came into force on 1 January 2005. They probably won’t be the last. Journalists and other people who care about openness in British government need to keep an eye out for the creeping narrowing of the Freedom of Information Act via “stealth exemptions” injected via Section 44.