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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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February 22nd,
2010 - Data Show Rendition Planes Landed in Poland |
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Data Show
Rendition Planes Landed in Poland By Nicholas Kulish & Scott Shane New York Times February 22, 2010 Berlin - Two human rights
groups released government flight logs Monday that showed aircraft linked to
the Central Intelligence Agency’s program for secretly detaining, moving and
housing terrorism suspects had landed in Poland. Polish authorities have long
denied that the country hosted one of the “black sites,” part of a network of
clandestine overseas prisons where suspected prisoners from Al Qaeda were
subjected to brutal interrogation methods under the C.I.A.’s so-called
rendition program. Prosecutors in Poland are investigating the country’s
possible participation in the program. The Polish Air Navigation
Services Agency confirmed that it provided the flight logs to the two rights
groups, the Open Society Justice Initiative and the Helsinki Foundation for
Human Rights. The logs showed six flights in 2003 by two aircraft, a
Gulfstream V and a Boeing 737, five of which originated in Kabul,
Afghanistan, and one in Rabat, Morocco, before landing at Szymany airport. Former American intelligence
officials have said that the chief plotter of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed, was interrogated at the secret base near Szymany airport after his
capture in 2003, but the agency has refused confirm that. “The agency does
not discuss publicly where facilities related to its past detention program
may, or may not, have been located,” said a C.I.A. spokesman, Paul
Gimigliano. Adam Bodnar, head of the
legal division at the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, based in Warsaw,
said that after years of anonymous reports, the flight records were the first
official confirmation of the C.I.A. flights to Poland. “We are getting closer
to the truth,” he said. “Of course Polish
authorities may help the C.I.A. in the fight against terrorism, but they are
bound by the Polish Constitution, which prohibits torture,” Mr. Bodnar said. The Polish government
declined to comment on the contents of the rights groups’ report. “The
prosecutor’s office is investigating the reports about the alleged use of the
Szymany airport,” said Piotr Paszkowski, a Foreign Ministry spokesman. Robert Majewski, the
prosecutor in charge of the investigation, told the Polish news agency PAP on
Monday that he did not expect the investigation “to end soon.” C.I.A. officials have said
that fewer than 100 prisoners were kept in the secret prisons between the
creation of the program in 2002 and the transfer of the remaining 14
prisoners to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba in 2006. Maciej Rodak, vice president
of the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency, confirmed that the agency had
sent the records to the human rights groups. He said that the agency could
not provide passenger lists, which the groups had also requested. “The thing that is quite
shocking is that the European investigations requested these specific flight
records some four years ago,” said Darian Pavli, a lawyer with the Open
Society Justice Initiative, a human rights group in New York. “The Poles all
these years said they could not locate them, the flights didn’t exist.” Nicholas Kulish reported
from Berlin, and Scott Shane from Washington. © 2010 The New York Times
Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/world/europe/23poland.html |