In an admission described as "shocking" by Britain's parliamentary group on renditions, a senior U.S. State Department official told United Press International Friday that flights transferring terror suspects abroad had passed through European countries with the full cooperation of the relevant governments.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said the United States would not and had not conducted renditions through Europe without the knowledge of European partners. There was a "sense of aggrievement" in Washington that European governments and citizens had benefited from information obtained through rendition, yet were now expressing "shock" at the policy.

"European governments and publics expect there to be broad, mutual intelligence cooperation," he said. "These are simply not the things that are talked about publicly."

The official would not confirm or deny whether rendition flights had passed through Britain, an allegation that British ministers deny. He would say only that the British government had relied on "various strands" of the argument in issuing their denial -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's assurance that the sovereignty of nation states was respected in all cases and its own records of just two U.S. rendition requests granted, both under the Clinton administration.

Outlining the arguments behind the use of rendition, the official said it had been practiced "for many decades, by many countries," and until its recent re-characterization had been an "accepted practice and not a dirty word."

In most cases, renditions took place when an individual captured in one country was found to be wanted by another country, he explained. Instead of simply releasing them, they would be transferred over.

If they were wanted in the United States, or suspected by the U.S. authorities of links to terrorism or terrorist-related activities, they would in most cases be rendered back to the United States, he said. In a few cases, they would be held by another country on behalf of the United States.

"The purpose of rendition is not to send people where they could be tortured. It is to ensure that people who are wanted for terrorist acts around the world are brought to justice," he insisted.

But Andrew Tyrie, chairman of Britain's all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary renditions and a Conservative parliamentarian, said the official's arguments were inadvertently "a devastating indictment of what the American administration has been doing."

"This illustrates how dangerously out of touch the U.S. State Department is with most of Western opinion.

"He is accusing a number of Western European governments of being duplicitous with their own electorates and their own parliaments, and that is a shocking allegation."

At the heart of the debate was the issue of the policy's effect on the fight against terrorism, he told UPI.

"Are we influencing the opinion of moderates in the communities from which these people are being taken, and are we therefore generating a higher risk of terrorism with these activities rather than reducing it?

"That is the balance sheet, and no one has yet shown many positive entries in the ledger."

Tyrie challenged the State Department to reveal how many people had been rendered abroad by the United States since Sept. 11 and to say how many of these had been brought to trial in open court.

The United States must also explain why individuals suspected by U.S. authorities of links to terrorism had to be questioned extra-territorially.

"If they have information that can help save lives, why can they not conduct these interrogations on U.S. soil?

"Furthermore, if the U.S. administration thinks that heavy-handed methods can obtain higher quality information, then why don't they explain that to the American people and change the law to allow them to be conducted in the United States, within the framework of the law?"

Tyrie told UPI that the official had implied the British government had been "less than frank" in its insistence that no rendition flights had passed through its territory apart from two under the Clinton Administration.

The State Department could provide reassurance very easily by publishing a list of those European countries through which rendition flights had passed, he said.

He warned the British government against "just hoping for the passage of time to assuage these concerns," saying that the allegations of "complicity in serious breaches of the law" would not simply disappear. As individuals who had been subject to renditions were released, evidence would come into the public domain that would likely lead to criminal investigations, he predicted.

A former government intelligence analyst, Crispin Black, told UPI that he saw no problem with using rendition as "an easy form of extradition," by which an individual was transported to a country where he was wanted by authorities.

But Black, who until 2002 briefed Downing Street on the terror threat, said such cases were "pretty rare." Far more common was the use of rendition to evade legal restrictions on interrogations, he said.

It appeared that in building a case for the practice of rendition, U.S. officials were trying to sanitize the outward face of the policy in order to distract from the more distasteful aspects, he added.

Black said he believed that European governments had been complicit with the practice, but was "skeptical" about how much useful intelligence they had received as a result of it.

Lord Timothy Garden, a former British assistant chief of defense staff and Liberal Democrat defense spokesperson, said the "only reason" to transport terror suspects abroad was to evade human rights protections and allow for more aggressive interrogation techniques.

Asked by UPI if there was any merit to the policy in security terms, Garden replied: "Absolutely none at all. You can take the moral view, the legal view, but just in the practical view, it is completely counterproductive and always has been."

He continued: "Information obtained under torture is invariably unreliable. There are much better and more effective methods of interrogation."

If an individual was being tortured during interrogation and was asked for a list of names, if he or she did not have such information they would simply invent it, he said.

The policy was also counterproductive in terms of the image of the United States around the world, Garden said, as it was extremely difficult to promote democracy around the world while simultaneously engaged in this kind of "immoral and uncivilized" practice.

"It just bewilders me, what the United States thinks it is doing," he concluded.

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