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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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July 30th,
2010 - Documents Show CIA Prisoners Held in Poland |
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Documents Show
CIA Prisoners Held in Poland From thenews.pl July 30, 2010 Evidence given to the
Helsinki Foundation by border guards in Poland reveal, for the first time,
official documentation of people, presumed to be terrorist suspects,
disembarking from planes in Poland leased by the CIA. The revelations add to
previous reports alleging that a secret CIA prison existed in northern Poland
where al-Qaida suspects were held. The documents reportedly show that from
December 202 to July 2003, 20 people were held for various lengths of time in
a facility near the Szymany airfield in the northeast of Poland. On 5 December 2002, a
Gulfstream N63MU brought the first eight terrorist suspects from Dubai to
Szymany. Next followed secret flights from Morocco and Afghanistan. The last
CIA plane - a Boeing 737 - landed in Szymany on 22 September to collect five
people who were flown to Cyprus, show flight logs. The final flight recorded
by the documents seen by the Rzeczpospolita newspaper - a Boeing 737, flight
number N313P - landed in Poland on 22 September 2003. The documents do not reveal
names or nationality of the passengers of the CIA planes, however, and one MP
says that there is nothing contained in the documents to suggest that the
people on the aircrafts - describe in one document as being “businessmen” -
were al-Qaeda suspects. “There is still no evidence
that these people were terrorist suspects, imprisoned by the CIA,” Civic
Platform MP Konstanty Miodowicz, who heads the Parliamentary Special Services
Committee, told Rzeczpospolita. In February, air traffic control
in Warsaw confirmed that at least six CIA planes landed in Poland in 2003,
the first time Polish authorites acknowledged the existence of the planes
after years of stonewalling on the issue. "It is time for the
authorities to provide a full accounting of Poland's role in rendition,"
Adam Bodnar, of the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights said. Mounting evidence Despite denials of any CIA
prison by president of Poland at the time, Aleksander Kwasniewski and other
officials, evidence of their existence has been mounting this year. In January, Abd al-Rahim
al-Nashiri, suspected of the 2000 al-Qaida bombing of the USS Cole, was
interrogated and had his basic human rights violated in a secret CIA prison
in northern Poland, claimed a UN report.
The 226-page report on CIA
detention centres in Europe was presented to the UN Human Rights Council in
March. It alleged that the US kept
the prisons throughout the world secret - such as the one thought to have
been housed in northern Poland between 2003 and 2005 - so as to be able to
obtain information from suspects using unlawful methods, such as torture. The report said: “Secret
detention as such may constitute torture or ill-treatment for the direct
victims as well as their families,' the investigators said, adding that the
victims and their families deserve compensation and those responsible should
be prosecuted.” External link: http://www.thenews.pl/international/artykul136689_documents-show-cia-prisoners-held-in-poland.html |