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| "Keep it as tight as possible": Airstrip @ Szczytno-Szymany Airport Only the Polish prime minister and top Polish intelligence brass were told of the plan, in which agents of the United States quietly shuttled detainees from other holding facilities around the globe for stopovers and short-term interrogation in Poland between late 2002 and 2004. According to a confidential British intelligence memo, Prime Minister Tony Blair told Poland's then-Prime Minister Leszek Miller to keep the information secret, even from his own government. “Miller was asked to keep it as tight as possible,” the memo said.[source] |
On the grounds of the Polish intelligence-training academy and nicknamed "Markus Wolf" for the former East German spy chief, it's the focal point for a top-secret probe that Polish prosecutors have launched into how their government tolerated rampant violations of international and Polish law.
If former officials are brought to trial, or if the stacks of classified files in the prosecutors' offices are made public, the result will be revelations about an American anti-terrorism operation whose details U.S. officials are fighting to keep secret.
Already the prosecutor has charged Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, Poland's former interior minister and intelligence chief, with unlawful detention and corporal punishment for allowing the CIA to operate at Stare Kiejkuty from December 2002 to September 2003.
And the prosecutor's office has given victim status in the case to two men the U.S. is holding indefinitely at Guantanamo: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi charged with masterminding the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, and Abu Zubaydah, whom the Bush administration once described as the third-ranking leader of al-Qaida but who may have been only a safe house minder. Al-Nashiri faces a possible death sentence; Abu Zubaydah, who's been held for 10 years, hasn't been charged.
Their status as victims comes from claims that they were kidnapped by U.S. authorities, brought to Poland illegally, tortured, then spirited from Poland to other detention centers without the legally required extradition proceedings.
The villa cannot be seen from the main road or spotted on Google Earth maps. At the request of Polish authorities, its location has been blurred, the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported.
That's what some parts of the Polish government would like to have happen to everything that took place here.
State prosecutors, on the other hand, seem motivated to bring the case to court. The Polish investigation is now in its fifth year, has twice been reassigned to new prosecutors and will run at least until mid-February, it was announced last week. It is, to date, the only criminal prosecution in the world related to the CIA's so-called "black sites." The Obama administration has declined to investigate what happened at any of the sites, which included facilities in Thailand, Romania and Lithuania.
The prosecution is slow-going, but serious, according to Mikolaj Pietrzak, the Polish legal counsel for Guantanamo detainee Nashiri. The two prosecutors, Katarzyna Plonczyk and Janusz Sliwa, specialize in organized crime and counterterrorism and are "very capable, very competent," said Pietrzak, who's a former senior staffer of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. His costs are borne by the Open Society Institute Justice Initiative, a U.S. foundation [a George Soros project...CV]
"The prosecutor is working very robustly. It is a very broad and thorough investigation - which doesn't mean it's effective," he said in an interview in Warsaw. "Everything ... could have been done much, much quicker."
The prosecution has interviewed 62 witnesses and compiled 20 volumes of material, the Helsinki Foundation said.
Pietrzak has yet to see all the documents that have been collected in al-Nashiri's case. He's been allowed to see unclassified files in Krakow, but he's had only fleeting access to the classified documents - under a previous prosecutor. But what he's seen convinces him that his client was terribly mistreated in the villa.
"My analysis of those papers has removed any shred of doubt as to the accuracy of statements made in our application" for victim status, he said.
Other prisoners were very likely held here and treated in a way that Polish law prohibits.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, declassified Bush-era documents have revealed.
That treatment came at a time he was probably in Poland, said Irmina Pacho, of the Helsinki Foundation's "strategic litigation" program. But Mohammed is representing himself at Guantanamo, so there's no way lawyers can plead for him here. Read more>>Poland Shedding Light on Secret CIA Prison
