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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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November 19th,
2009 - Lithuania Investigates Facility that may have been CIA ‘Black Site’ |
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Lithuania Investigates
Facility that may have been CIA ‘Black Site’ Townspeople tell of secretive Americans at mysterious building By Craig Whitlock Washington Post November 19, 2009 Antaviliai, Lithuania -
Residents of this village were mystified five years ago when tight-lipped
American construction workers suddenly appeared at a mothballed riding stable
here and built a large, two-story building without windows, ringed by a metal
fence and security cameras. Today, a Lithuanian
parliamentary committee is investigating whether the CIA operated a secret
prison for terrorism suspects on the plot of land at the edge of a thick
forest for more than a year, from 2004 until late 2005. Lithuanian land registry
documents reviewed by The Washington Post show the property was bought in
March 2004 by Elite LLC, an unincorporated U.S. firm registered in the
District. Records in Lithuania and
Washington do not reveal the names of individual officers for Elite but
identify its sole shareholder as Star Finance Group and Holdings Inc., a
Panamanian corporation. There is no record of Elite owning other property in
Lithuania. The company, which has since
had its registration revoked by D.C. authorities, in turn sold the property
to the Lithuanian government in 2007, two years after the existence of the
CIA's overseas network of secret prisons known as black sites - including
some in Eastern Europe - was first revealed by The Washington Post. At the time, The Post
withheld the names of Eastern European countries involved in the covert
program at the request of White House officials, who argued that disclosure
could subject those countries to retaliation from al-Qaeda. The Lithuanian government has
not publicly confirmed whether the property was one of the CIA's black sites. The site in Antaviliai,
about 15 miles outside the capital, Vilnius, is now used by Lithuania's State
Security Department as a training center. Department officials have declined
to comment on the circumstances under which it acquired the property or
whether it was used by the CIA. A CIA spokesman also declined to comment. Domas Grigaliunas, a former
counterintelligence officer with the Lithuanian military, said it was widely known
among the Lithuanian secret services that U.S. intelligence partners had
built the site, although its original purpose was kept highly classified. "It just popped up out
of nowhere," he said in an interview. "Everybody knew this was
handed to us by the Americans." Grigaliunas said he was
asked in 2004 by the deputy director of Lithuanian military intelligence to
develop plans to help a "foreign partner" that was interested in
bringing individuals to Lithuania and concealing their whereabouts as part of
a covert operation. He said he made some
recommendations but was never told the identity of the foreign partner or
whether the operation was carried out. Since then, however, he said he has
become convinced that the program involved the CIA's detention centers for
terrorism suspects. "I have no documents to
prove it, and I never worked in any prisons, but I believe they existed
here," he said in an interview. Villagers who live in a
crumbling apartment complex about 100 yards from the site recalled how
English-speaking construction workers descended on a small, shuttered
horse-riding academy there in 2004. They said the workers refused to answer
questions about what they were doing but brought shipping containers filled
with building materials. The workers also excavated large amounts of soil;
with all the digging, residents said they assumed that part of the new
facility was underground. "If you got close, they
would tell us, in English, to go away," said a retired man who lives
nearby and spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fears of retribution.
"We were really wondering what they were up to. We even wondered if it
was a Mafia drug operation or something." Members of the Lithuanian
Parliament's National Security and Defense Committee visited the site
recently as part of their investigation into whether the CIA detained
terrorism suspects on Lithuanian territory. The probe was authorized
last month by the Parliament after ABC News reported in August that two
CIA-chartered flights had brought al-Qaeda prisoners from Afghanistan to
Vilnius in 2004 and 2005. Lithuanian government
officials denied the ABC News report at the time and said there was no
documentation that the flights ever landed in their country. But the
Parliament decided to take another look after Lithuania's newly elected
president, Dalia Grybauskaite, said in October that she had "indirect
suspicions" that reports of the CIA prison were accurate and urged a
more comprehensive investigation. Arvydas Anusauskas, chairman
of the National Security and Defense Committee, declined to comment on its findings.
In response to written questions submitted by The Post, he said the committee
would interview "all the persons who might have known or could have
known the information in question." "The committee has all
rights and tools to ultimately clarify the situation and to either confirm or
deny any allegations of the transportation of detainees by the Central
Intelligence Agency of the United States and their detention on the territory
of the Republic of Lithuania," he said. Lithuanian officials have also
been pressed to investigate by the Council of Europe, an official human
rights watchdog, which has conducted its own probe of CIA operations on the
continent. Council officials said they had received confidential records
confirming that CIA-chartered planes had flown from Afghanistan to Vilnius in
2004 and 2005. Thomas Hammarberg, the
council's commissioner for human rights, said in a telephone interview that
flight logs had been doctored to indicate that the planes had touched down in
neighboring countries, including Finland and Poland. Hammarberg visited Vilnius
last month and said he personally urged Lithuanian officials to take the
issue more seriously. "I told them it is quite likely that further
information might leak from the United States, so they should hurry up and do
their own investigation now," he said. Staff writers Joby Warrick
and Ellen Nakashima and researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to
this report. © 2009 The Washington Post
Company External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/18/AR2009111803994_2.html |