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March 7th,
2007 - Soviet-Era Compound in Poland was Site of Secret CIA Interrogation |
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Soviet-Era Compound in Northern
Poland was Site of Secret CIA Interrogation, Detentions By Larisa Alexandrovna and David Dastych Raw Story March 7, 2007 US, Britain asked Poland to
join clandestine program Poland - The CIA operated an
interrogation and short-term detention facility for suspected terrorists
within a Polish intelligence training school with the explicit approval of
British and US authorities, according to British and Polish intelligence
officials familiar with the arrangements. Intelligence officials
identify the site as a component of a Polish intelligence training school
outside the northern Polish village of Stare Kiejkuty. While previously
suspected, the facility has never been conclusively identified as being part
of the CIA's secret rendition and detention program. 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 shown to RAW STORY, 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. The complex at Stare
Kiejkuty, a Soviet-era compound once used by German intelligence in World War
II, is best known as having been the only Russian intelligence training
school to operate outside the Soviet Union. Its prominence in the Soviet era
suggests that it may have been the facility first identified – but never
named – when the Washington Post’s Dana Priest revealed the existence of the
CIA’s secret prison network in November 2005. Reached by telephone Monday,
Priest would not discuss the allegations in her article beyond her original
report. CIA spokesman Paul
Gimigliano would not confirm or deny any allegations about the Polish
facility. He maintained the rendition program was legal and conducted “with
great care.” “The agency’s terrorist
interrogation program has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close
review, producing vital information that has helped disrupt plots and save
lives,” Gimigliano said Monday. “That is also true of renditions, another
key, lawful tool in the fight against terror.” “The United States does not
conduct or condone torture, nor does it transfer anyone to other countries
for the purpose of torture,” he added. US intelligence officials
confirmed that the CIA had used the compound at Stare Kiejkuty in the past.
Speaking generally about the agency’s program, a former senior official said
the CIA had never conducted unlawful interrogations. “We never tortured anyone,”
one former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity. “We
sent them to countries that did torture, but not on this scale.” The official added that many
agency staff had strong feelings about the rendition program. “Career people
were really opposed to this.” All intelligence sources
interviewed said the CIA is no longer operating a rendition or secret
detainment program. Polish intelligence
officials declined to comment. Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, the former head of
Polish intelligence, told a Polish news agency in 2005, however, that the CIA
had access to two internal zones at the Stare Kiejkuty training school.
Current and former Polish authorities have adamantly denied that Poland
played any role in the clandestine program. US, United Kingdom invited Poland to join program in 2002 In April 2002, according to
British foreign intelligence sources (MI6), senior officials in the Bush and
Blair administrations decided that the Bagram base near Kabul in Afghanistan
could not operate successfully in the Bush administration’s “no holds barred”
policy towards suspected terrorists. MI6 officials say the two
administrations then decided to fly high-value suspected terrorists to secret
gulags in Eastern Europe. The CIA-operated flights would pass through the air
space of a number of countries – among them Britain, Germany, Spain and
Poland. European Union officials and human rights groups would later say
these interrogations may have violated the Geneva Conventions and the United
Nations Convention against Torture, to which the United States and Poland are
both signatories. After a series of secret
meetings chaired by MI6 chief Sir John Scarlett in London and then-CIA
Director George Tenet in Washington, Polish intelligence was invited to join
the project, British and Polish intelligence sources say. Authorities singled out a
remote and infrequently used airfield in the Northern Polish town of Szymany
for transit flights; a near-by Polish intelligence training school at Stare
Kiejkuty would be used as an eventual detention-interrogation center for temporary
detention and short-term interrogations. The White House did not
return two calls seeking comment. Tenet could not be reached. Rendition programs were
first employed by the Clinton administration in order to target suspected
elements of al Qaeda. These covert operations, run out of the CIA, were used
intermittently and on a limited basis. It was not until the Bush
Administration that the use of extraordinary rendition became a matter of
policy and was employed on a large scale. The Szczytno-Szymany Airport Szczytno-Szymany used to be
a military airfield in northeastern Poland, one of many such airstrips that
could accept the large Soviet-made military planes of the Warsaw Pact; before
that, it had served as an airstrip for German Luftwaffe bombers targeting
Warsaw in the Second World War. In 1996, seven years after Poland’s communist
government fell, the military airfield was turned into a private company:
Airports “Mazury-Szczytno.” However, traffic wasn’t
heavy enough to provide decent income to the state and private owners of the
airfield, so motorcycle and car races were organized on the tarmac;
small-scale production and repairs also buttressed the company’s budget. But after the start of
Operation Enduring Freedom – the US military campaign against Afghanistan in
response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks – everything changed. In the years
that followed, American planes began arriving from Afghanistan, continuing on
to Morocco, Uzbekistan and Guantanamo Bay, according to Szymany locals and
airport staff. Then-Szymany airport manager
Mariola Przewlocka told European Union investigators the flights were likely
linked with the intelligence complex at Stare Kiejkuty, about 12 miles away
from the airport. Przewlocka said that
whenever one of the suspected flights was scheduled to land, “orders were
given directly by the regional border guards… emphasizing that the airport
authorities should not approach the aircraft and that military staff and
services alone” would handle landings. “Money for the services was
paid in cash, sometimes as much as four times the normal charge,” the former
airport manager added. “Handling of the passengers aboard was carried out in
a remote corner of the Szymany airstrip. People came in and out from
four-wheel drive cars with shaded windows.” The cars were seen traveling
to and from the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence facility, where British and
Polish intelligence officials say US agents conducted short-term
interrogations before shuffling prisoners to other locations. Przewlocka also spoke in
detail with the Chicago Tribune, whose correspondent traveled to Szymany last
month. “Secret prisons” were likely
temporary “black sites” Former European and US
intelligence officials indicate that the secret prisons across the European
Union, first identified by the Washington Post, are likely not permanent
locations, making them difficult to identify. What some believe was a
network of secret prisons was most probably a series of facilities used
temporarily by the United States when needed, officials say. Interim “black
sites” – secret facilities used for covert activities – can be as small as a
room in a government building, which only becomes a black site when a
prisoner is brought in for short-term detainment and interrogation. For example, detainees could
be shuffled from a temporary black site in one country to a temporary black
site in another country, never staying long enough at either to attract
notice. Such an arrangement, sources say, would allow plausible deniability by
the host country as well as the US. Investigators looking for a permanent
facility would never find one. Such a site, sources say, would have to be
near an airport. Washington-based security
expert and president of Global Security John Pike says short-term detention
in already existing facilities would be “sensible tradecraft” and a more
likely scenario than a network of specific, long term prisons. “A short-term operation does
not develop a big signature and you don’t have a continual parade of people,”
said Pike. “When it becomes noticeable, they move it all.” “It’s a shell game,” he
added. Pressure from US and Britain to keep quiet In the wake of the
Washington Post expose, member countries of the European Union began to
demand answers. According to British and
Polish intelligence officials, foreign journalists, and EU sources
interviewed for this article, the countries participating in the US rendition
and detention program and their governments were kept largely out of the
loop. Officials say Bush and Blair administration contacts selectively chose
politicians in the EU and other countries, keeping their respective
governments in the dark. Having only a select few
members of the European Union aware of the program, coupled with the
transience of the prison network, made it difficult for European Union
investigators to verify allegations of secret detention sites. A ten-member EU delegation
traveled to Poland in November 2006 to investigate Szymany airport and the
facility at Stare Kiejstuty. The team’s report indicates that key government
officials first agreed to meet with the delegates, but declined to do so
after their arrival. The delegates requested
interviews of 20 Polish government officials, journalists and others, but
were allowed to speak with only nine. Of those interviewed, only a handful
could offer any substantive information. One of the more interesting
interviews came from former Szczytno-Szymany Airport chairman Jerzy Kos.
According to the report, Kos stated that at the time the airport was under
his authority, it belonged to the Military Property Agency and was leased by
his company. Kos stated that after a
Boeing 737 landed on Sept. 22, 2003, a standard military procedure came into
force under which Polish Border Guards determined the character of incoming
flights and expedited certain arrivals. “The military procedure was
a simplified one, including provision for no customs clearance,” Kos told
investigators. He said he had “no information about the passengers as
procedure was undertaken by soldiers and not the civilian airport staff.” Kos asserted that during his
tenure from 2003 to 2004, Gulfstream planes transferring through the airport
were treated as military flights in the same fashion as the Border Guards had
handled the Boeing 737 in September 2003. Air traffic controllers “had
been informed by the Warsaw-based Air Traffic Agency that Gulfstream planes
would land at the airport by fax,” Kos told investigators. Polish public television
journalist Adam Krzykowski added more detail. Krzykowski alleged that the
September 2003 Boeing 737 carried a crew of seven and was joined at the
Szymany airfield by five passengers who declared themselves businessmen.
According to the EU report, Krzykowski maintained that all twelve “were
American citizens.” “The Boeing flight was not
subject to standard border control procedure, but to a … simplified procedure
[which] meant that no customs officers were present during the control and
passengers were checked only on basis of a list delivered to the Border
Guards,” he said. “According to the Border Guards, such a procedure is used
when a person has already been checked up on previously.” The final report of the
European Union’s investigation into Poland as well as the other countries
alleged to be part of the rendition program can be read here. Most of those
the EU sought to question did not cooperate with investigators, including
suspected governments, journalists and key officials in the United States. Dana Priest, the Washington
Post reporter who received a Pulitzer Prize for her article exposing the
CIA’s secret detention centers, declined to speak with EU investigators. “The Post never allows its
reporters to testify to government inquiries no matter what government it is,
so there was nothing unusual in that regard,” Priest said Monday. The only member of the Bush
Administration given leave to discuss the program with the EU was Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, who said she expected American allies to
co-operate and keep quiet about sensitive anti-terrorism operations.” The Reopening of Szymany Airport The “prime-time” for Szymany
International Airport seems to have ended in 2006, when the investigation by
the European Parliament was finished without a clear result or definitive
proof of “CIA secret prisons” existing in Poland. Polish officials refused to
cooperate and vehemently denied any role in the CIA program. The airport
company had to suspend its activities, due to a dispute over the ownership of
the Szczytno-Szymany airfield. In November 2006, the
company signed a lease agreement with the Military Property Agency, which
still owns the land and the facilities. This agreement opened the way for
financing of the airport by the regional administration and the Polish
government. The Szymany airfield, now in
civilian hands and allegedly free of “rendition flights,” will soon become a
regional airport. Its beautiful location in the Masurian Lakes Region will
likely kindle its development, and the fame of its history surrounding secret
CIA flights could certainly become an attractive tourist-catching slogan. Muriel Kane contributed
research for this article and John Byrne contributed reporting. External link: http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Sovietera_compound_in_Poland_was_site_0307.html |