A few days ago the well-known human rights organization "Amnesty International" made public its latest report accusing Washington of contempt of international law and gross violation of the rights of people suspected of belonging to "Al-Qaeda" and other terrorist organizations.

The report entitled "Secret Flights to Torture and Disappearance" gives a whole series of facts confirming the active functioning of a network of secret prisons run by the CIA and US military intelligence across the world. The authors of the report quote, in particular, the former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, V. Cannistraro, who let out some shocking details.

For example, a man seized by Americans in Afghanistan on suspicion of belonging to "Al-Qaeda" was flown, after he had refused to cooperate with US interrogators at Guantanamo military prison in Cuba, to Egypt where local torturers "promptly tore his fingernails out".

The report also cites the testimony of three Yemeni citizens captured and taken out of that country by US agents. For 18 months they were subjected to "tough" interrogation and moved from one secret prison to another. As a result, they "visited" Djibouti, Afghanistan and "somewhere in Eastern Europe" (judging by the length of flights and some other details, it could have been Slovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and Turkey). After the US investigators had understood that they could not squeezed anything of value out of the Yemenis, they put them on a regular flight and sent them back home, without ever offering a word of apology.

These people seem to have been very lucky. Many other people seized by US secret services just disappeared without a trace, and nobody knows where they are now, nor what happened to them. Thus a German citizen of Syrian origin, M. Zammar, was kidnapped, as his relatives say, in Casablanca (Morocco) in October of 2001, after which he was said to have been seen in a secret underground prison "somewhere in Syria". Thereafter his tracks were lost. And there are scores of such cases.

"Amnesty International" has on record over a thousand of secret CIA flights made by one "Boeing-737" and three "Gulfstream" planes flown under the guise of fake US private airlines. The main transit points of the "flying prisons" were Germany, UK, Ireland and Portugal, and the destination points Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Czechia and Cyprus. Also flights to Azerbaijan, Estonia and even one landing at Moscow have been reported.

Till recently the lack of direct and unequivocal proof made any information about CIA secret prisons not quite well grounded, so the official reaction of the US administration and CIA top officials to all those exposures was either downright denial voiced mostly by State Secretary Condoleezza Rice, or plain silence. However, meticulous European parliamentarians and human rights activists kept on digging, and the European parliament had even set up an ad hoc commission to investigate the charges.

But now Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte had to publicly acknowledge the existence of CIA secret prisons. Moreover, he disclosed that about three dozen of the "most dangerous" militants of "Al-Qaeda" and other persons suspected of association with that organization were being held in those prisons.

J. Negroponte said: "These people are being held. And they're bad actors. And as long as this situation continues, this war on terror continues, I'm not sure I can tell you what the ultimate disposition of those detainees will be". The US spy chief also said that US secret services were consolidating their strength "to assure world security". However, he refrained from making any long-term forecasts, acknowledging that that task would "require a lot of time". True, J. Negroponte mentioned that the US would try to set up cooperation with secret services of other states, including even China.

It is not clear if the US Director of National Intelligence had in mind using territories of other countries to set up there "convenient" secret dungeons and torture chambers for "America's enemies". Be that as it may, Negroponte's revelations have not come as a surprise to informed experts. Most of them were already convinced that "the CIA secret prisons" were no fruit of wild fantasies of sensation-mongering journalists. Indeed, there has been ample indirect evidence of such secret activities of the CIA and other US secret services.

Negroponte's latest revelations prove that the US leadership sticks to its principle of "all in fair in war on international terrorism". In this context all assurances the Bush administration has been giving about its alleged condemnation of the use of torture and rendition of suspects and detainees to those countries where they may face death penalty or torture are mere empty words.

No wonder Washington has long been accused of practicing double standards on international scene, while its harsh criticism of other countries for alleged "gross violations of human rights" looks especially cynical.