CIA flights to Greenland investigated

Denmark will investigate claims that the CIA secretly used an airport on the Nordic country's remote Arctic territory of Greenland to transport prisoners in the U.S. war on terror, the prime minister said Thursday.

Denmark, like many other European countries, began investigating reports in 2005 that the U.S. intelligence agency quietly touched down on their territory as part of the CIA's so-called "extraordinary rendition" program.

Human rights groups have criticized the practice, in which suspects are transported for interrogation to countries outside the U.S. for interrogation.

A Danish TV documentary broadcast Wednesday by the DR1 TV network claimed that prisoner flights not only used mainland Denmark's airports and airspace but also touched down on Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory between Europe and North America.

"In the light of the new information, we will be looking into what happened and if need be, we will ask the Americans for explanations," Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/01/31/denmark.cia.ap/index.html