Update on Secret Prisons and Secretive Prisons
Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe

First, reaction following the WaPo's article from yesterday on the secret prisons run by the CIA in Europe; from the BBC:

The European Commission has said it will examine reports that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set up secret jails in Eastern Europe.

Spokesman Friso Roscam Abbing told the BBC News website that its justice experts would be contacting European Union member states over the issue.

But he stressed that a formal investigation had not been launched.
[...]
Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross has said it wants access to all foreign terror suspects held by the US.

Its chief spokeswoman, Antonella Notari, said it was concerned about the fate of an unknown number of people captured as part of the Bush administration's war on terror and allegedly held at undisclosed places of detention.

Via Laura Rozen's War and Piece, we get this from Eric Umansky:

Human Rights Watch is about to name names. Two European countries are apparently hosting CIA prisons: Poland and Romania

I don't see anything on the HRW site quite yet, but I'll keep a look out.

From Europe, we go to Gitmo, via the Inter Press News Service (IPS):

Amid growing concern over the fate and conditions of inmates engaged in a lengthy hunger strike at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday said he would not permit U.N. investigators to interview detainees there.

Rumsfeld depicted the strike, in which about half of the estimated 540 detainees at the prison have so far reportedly taken part since July, as a deliberate effort to attract media attention. He stressed that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) will continue to have unlimited access to the prisoners, some of whom have been held for four years without trial.
[...]
The prison authorities have reportedly responded to the strikes by force-feeding weakened inmates by strapping them to tables and inserting long tubes through their nasal passages.

According to recently declassified statements by detainees to their attorneys, feeding procedures amount to torture and are being carried out in a sadistic manner.

Look, I understand that this is not about asking these guys to please fess up to the bad things they've done or are planning to do. Tough measures are required. But fuzzy lines have been crossed and are continuing to be crossed, and without any kind of oversight or even slightly gauzy transparency, we're turning ourselves into the enemy we despise. This is not what the United States stands for.