The question of whether Poland hosted a secret detention facility for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency remains murky, but evidence is mounting, slowly.
All may become a lot clearer if Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza is correct in reporting Wednesday that Poland's former leaders may face war crime charges for agreeing to host the facility.
According to earlier unconfirmed reports, Poland hosted a secret CIA prison in 2002-2005, during the presidency of Aleksander Kwasniewski and the government run by Leszek Miller, both leaders of the left-leaning Democratic Left Alliance.
Reports of the existence of the prison first appeared in 2005, and in 2007 a Council of Europe investigation led by Dick Marty concluded it had “factually established that secret detention centers operated by the CIA have existed for some years in Poland and Romania” and possibly other states, with the Polish facility being host to detainees who were considered especially sensitive.
It said “The detainees were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, sometimes protracted.”
Polish authorities have repeatedly denied the existence of any facility.
Since then, news media brought more details. In June 2008, the New York Times said, citing unnamed CIA officers, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been held in Poland. A Kuwaiti suspected of mass murder of civilians, he remains in U.S. custody. Later in the year, Polish daily Dziennik quoted two anonymous Polish intelligence officers who said the CIA held terror suspects inside a military intelligence training base in Kiejkuty, northeastern Poland. Only the CIA had access to the zone created in the secluded base, but which had easy access to a former military airport in the vicinity, according to the report.
Earlier this year for the first time the Polish aviation authority delivered the first official confirmation that airplanes operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency landed in Poland in 2003.
~ more... ~
No comments:
Post a Comment