THE SPANISH government has ordered an investigation into why the Popular Party (PP) government authorised the use of Spanish airspace to transport alleged terrorist detainees to Guantánamo Bay between 2001 and 2005.
José Maria Aznar, PP prime minister until 2004, was - and remains - a loyal defender of US president George Bush.
He sent Spanish troops to fight alongside the allies in spite of the fact that the vast majority of Spaniards opposed it. One of the first decisions taken by his successor, current prime minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, was to withdraw them.
Since that time many questions have been asked as to whether military bases in Spain had been used for CIA flights. and over the years evidence emerged that between May 2002 and October 2006 at least 11 flights had stopped at Rota and Móron air bases, in the south of the country, at Torrejón near Madrid, and in Palma de Mallorca, almost all en route to or from Guantánamo Bay. A further dozen flights are believed to have flown on similar routes over the same period without landing.
Last month, the director of the Spanish Centre for National Intelligence told the official secrets committee of the parliament that his office had found no evidence any crime had been committed on Spanish territory, although international law prohibits overflying of foreign territory without a guarantee on the human rights of those on board.
At the same time, he refused to confirm or deny whether the Spanish bases had been used to transport Guantánamo prisoners.
This week the newspaper El Paíshas been printing leaked documents, some marked " Muy Secreto" (top secret), in which an American official asked the foreign ministry for permission to use the bases for technical stopovers.
In a letter dated January 10th, 2002, Miguel Aguirre de Cárcer, at the time director general for North American affairs, sent a letter to foreign minister Josep Piqué in which he wrote: "The USA is about to begin flights to carry Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners from Afghanistan to the base at Guantánamo in Cuba. The US government would like authorisation to use airfields [in Spain] if necessary."
In other letters Mr Aguirre de Cárcer recommended the use of Móron (near Seville) because it was "the most discreet", but warned of "legal consequences" if it was later proven that some of the detainees were Europeans. He recommended that if the press learned about these flights they should be told that they had made emergency landings.
Mr Aznar left office in March 2004, a year before the CIA flights are believed to have ended.
Mr Zapatero, his foreign minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos, and José Bono, defence minister in the first Zapatero government and now speaker of the parliament, have denied all knowledge of these letters.
The press leaks confirm a 2007 European Parliament report which criticised 14 member states, including Ireland, for failing to deter CIA renditions. Socialist MEP Claudio Fava concluded that more than a thousand flights had flown over or landed on European territory, including 147 in Ireland and 68 in Spain - between 2001 and 2005.