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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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April 27th,
2009 - New Evidence of Torture Prison in Poland |
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New Evidence of Torture
Prison in Poland Europe’s ‘Special Interrogations’ By John Goetz & Britta Sandberg Der Spiegel April 27, 2009 The current debate in the US
on the "special interrogation methods" sanctioned by the Bush
administration could soon reach Europe. It has long been clear that the CIA
used the Szymany military airbase in Poland for extraordinary renditions. Now
there is evidence of a secret prison nearby. Only a smattering of clouds
dotted the sky over Szymany on March 7, 2003, and visibility was good. A
light breeze blew from the southeast as a plane approached the small military
airfield in northeastern Poland, and the temperature outside was 2 degrees
Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit). At around 4:00 p.m., the Gulfstream N379P -
known among investigators as the "torture taxi" - touched down on
the landing strip. On board was the most
important prisoner the US had been able to produce in the war on terror:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks on New York and
Washington, also known as "the brains" behind al-Qaida. This was
the man who had presented Osama bin Laden with plans to attack the US with
commercial jets. He personally selected the pilots and supervised
preparations for the attacks. Eighteen months later, on March 1, 2003, Sheikh
Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan by US Special Forces and
brought to Afghanistan two days later. Now the CIA was flying him to a remote
area in Poland's Masuria region. The prisoner slept during the flight from
Kabul to Szymany, for the first time in days, as he later recounted: "My eyes were covered
with a cloth tied around my head. A cloth bag was then pulled over my head. …
I fell asleep. ... I therefore don't know how long the journey lasted." Jerry M., age 56 at the
time, probably sat at the controls of the plane chartered by the CIA. The
trained airplane and helicopter pilot had been hired by Aero Contractors, a
company that transferred prisoners around the world for US intelligence
agencies. According to documents from Eurocontrol, the European Organization
for the Safety of Air Navigation, Jerry M. had taken off from Kabul at 8:51
a.m. that morning. Only hours after landing in Poland, at 7:16 p.m., he took
off again, headed for Washington. A large number of Polish and
American intelligence operatives have since gone on record that the CIA
maintained a prison in northeastern Poland. Independent of these sources,
Polish government officials from the Justice and Defense Ministry have also
reported that the Americans had a secret base near Szymany airport. And so
began on March 7, 2003 one of the darkest chapters of recent American - and
European - history. Obama Under Pressure It was apparently here, just
under an hour's drive from Szymany airport, that Sheikh Mohammed was
tortured, exactly 183 times with waterboarding - an interrogation technique
that simulates the sensation of drowning - in March, 2003 alone. That
averages out to eight times a day. And all of this happened right here in
Europe. Over six years later, these
acts of torture are putting the new US president, Barack Obama, under intense
pressure. On the one hand, he released four memos in which his predecessor
George W. Bush had legalized such interrogation methods. On the other hand, he
decided not to prosecute the torturers. And he initially neglected to launch
investigations into these "special interrogation methods." It is the decision that has
earned Obama the harshest criticism during the first 100 days of his
presidency. Democrats from the Senate and the House of Representatives
announced last week that they would form a truth commission, essentially
putting them at odds with their own president. Obama quickly realized that he
had apparently underestimated the volatile nature of the issue. So he had US
Attorney General Eric Holder announce that no one stood above the law. Holder
promised that an investigation would be conducted to find out who in the
White House and the Justice Department had declared these methods legal. What the CIA did back then
to prisoners in the Polish military airbase of Stare Kiejkuty, north of
Szymany, had been authorized by the president. According to witnesses, Stare
Kiejkuty housed a secret CIA prison for "high value detainees" -
for the most prominent prisoners of the war on terror. There is now no doubt that
the Gulfstream N379P landed at least five times at Szymany between February
and July, 2003. Flight routes were manipulated and falsified for this purpose
and, with the knowledge of the Polish government, the European aviation
safety agency Eurocontrol was deliberately deceived. The public prosecutor's
office in Warsaw has the statement of a witness who described how people
wearing handcuffs and blindfolds were led from the aircraft at Szymany. He
said that this happened far away from the control tower. According to the
witness, it was always the same individuals and the same civilian vehicles
that stood waiting on the landing field. If we are to believe the
statements of Sheikh Mohammed, a large number of those present at the small
airfield wore ski masks. This is what he told a delegation from the
International Committee of the Red Cross that questioned him in the US
military prison at Guantanamo, Cuba in late 2006: "On arrival the
transfer from the airport to the next place of detention took about one hour.
I was transported sitting on the floor of a vehicle. I could see at one point
that there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing black, with masks
and army boots, like Planet-X people." Just under an hour's drive
corresponds roughly to the distance from Szymany to the Stare Kiejkuty
military base, known as a training camp for Polish intelligence agents. The
route there passes for two kilometers through a fenced-off military zone,
past dense pine forests, then heads northeast for 20 minutes, and finally
leads over an unpaved road alongside a lake. The entrance to the base is at
the end of this road. ‘I Was Never Threatened with Death’ Sheikh Mohammed said that
they cut the clothes from his body, photographed him naked and threw him in a
three-by-four-meter (10 x 13 ft) cell with wooden walls. That was when the
hardest phase of the interrogating began, he claims. According to Sheikh
Mohammed, one of his interrogators told him that they had received the green
light from Washington to give him a "hard time": "They never used the
word 'torture' and never referred to 'physical pressure,' only to 'a hard
time.' I was never threatened with death, in fact I was told that they would
not allow me to die, but that I would be brought to the 'verge of death and
back again.'" He says he was questioned
roughly eight hours a day. He spent the first month naked and standing, with
his hands chained to the ceiling of the cell, even at night. They led them
into another room for questioning, he says. That's where the bed stood that
he says he was strapped to for waterboarding. The mastermind behind the 9/11
attacks told members of the Red Cross that he eventually realized where he
was being held: "I think the country
was Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought
to me without the label removed. It had e-mail address ending in '.pl'. The
central-heating system was an old-style one that I would expect only to see
in countries of the former communist system." Thereafter, the al-Qaida
operative described how he was strapped to a special bed and submitted to
waterboarding: "Cold water from a
bottle that had been kept in a fridge was then poured onto the cloth by one
of the guards so that I could not breathe. This obviously could only be done
for one or two minutes at a time. The cloth was then removed and the bed was
put into a vertical position. The whole process was then repeated during
about one hour. Injuries to my ankles and wrists also occurred during the
waterboarding as I struggled in the panic of not being able to breathe." External link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,621450,00.html |