Shoot the messenger

I read about this story first on News for Greens: a Swiss magazine is reporting that the Swiss intelligence service intercepted a fax from Egypt's Foreign Minisry to its London embassy that mentions the existence of U.S. terror prisons in Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Kosovo and Macedonia.

Swiss Investigate Leak to Paper on C.I.A. Prisons in Eastern Europe

Christoph Grenacher, the newspaper's editor in chief, said that before the article was published, newspaper officials met with high-ranking Swiss government officials, who urged the paper to withhold the information. "We concluded that the discussion about so-called secret prisons is much more important than the interests of the secret service in Switzerland," he said.

The Swiss Army's chief prosecutor opened an investigation of Mr. Grenacher and two of his reporters to determine whether military secrets were exposed and to find the source of the leaks. The Swiss attorney general's office is also investigating the issue, adding another layer to its existing investigation of whether there were C.I.A. flights in Swiss airspace. Germany and Denmark are also examining accusations that the agency used their airspace to transport terrorism suspects. The United States has acknowledged flights but not the existence of prisons. A C.I.A. spokeswoman declined to comment on the report in the newspaper.

Conceivably, the journalists could face five years in prison for revealing military secrets, although no one prosecuted under the law has ever served any prison time, the authorities said. Martin Immenhauser, a spokesman for the military prosecutor, said of the document: "Nobody has told us that it's not authentic. I think you can say that it's 99 percent certain that it's authentic."