For years, the notion that Poland could allow the CIA to operate a secret prison in a remote lake region was treated as a crackpot idea by the country’s politicians, journalists and the public.
A heated political debate last week revealed how dramatically the narrative has changed.
In a string of revelations and political statements, Polish leaders have come closer than ever to acknowledging that the US ran a secret interrogation facility for terror suspects in 2002 and 2003 in the eastern European country.
Some officials recall the fear that prevailed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and defend the tough stance that former US president George W. Bush took against terrorists.
However, the debate is sometimes tinged with a hint of disappointment with Washington, as if Poland’s young democracy had been led astray — ethically and legally — by the superpower that it counts as a key ally, and then left alone to deal with the fallout.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Thursday that Poland has become the “political victim” of leaks from US officials that brought to light aspects of the secret rendition program.
In his most forthcoming comments on the matter to date, Tusk said an ongoing investigation into the case is proof of Poland’s democratic credentials and that Poland cannot be counted on in the future in such clandestine enterprises.
“Poland will no longer be a country where politicians — even if they are working arm-in-arm with the world’s greatest superpower — could make some deal somewhere under the table and then it would never see daylight,” said Tusk, who took office four years after the site was shuttered.
“Poland is a democracy where national and international law must be observed,” Tusk said. “This issue must be explained. Let there be no doubt about it either in Poland or on the other side of the ocean.”
To some, it sounded like a long-delayed admission that Poland allowed the US to run the secret site, where terror suspects were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics that human rights advocates consider torture.
“This statement is quite different from any others,” said Adam Bodnar, a human rights lawyer with the Helsinki Foundation in Warsaw. “From the general context, he’s kind of admitting that something is in the air. You can feel that this is an indirect confirmation.”
YEARS OF DENIAL
For years Polish officials and the public treated the idea that the CIA ran a prison in Poland as absurd and highly unlikely — even after the UN and the Council of Europe said they had evidence of its existence. Polish officials repeatedly rebuffed international calls for serious investigations. The idea slowly only began to get serious consideration after Polish prosecutors opened an investigation into the matter in 2008.
A new breakthrough came on Tuesday when a leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, reported that prosecutors have charged a former spy chief, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, for his role in allowing the site. Siemiatkowski was reportedly charged with depriving prisoners of war of their freedom and allowing corporal punishment.
Siemiatkowski has refused to comment, saying he was bound by secrecy laws on the matter. However, he did not deny the report.
The issue is hugely sensitive because any Polish leaders who would have cooperated with the US program would have been violating Poland’s constitution, both by giving a foreign power control over part of Polish territory and allowing crimes to take place there.
Any officials who were involved could — in theory — be charged with serious crimes, including crimes against humanity.
Bush wrote in his memoir Decision Points that he ordered the CIA to subject about 100 terror detainees to harsh interrogation techniques, saying the methods did not constitute unlawful torture and that they produced intelligence that prevented further attacks. Neither he nor the CIA have officially said where the “black sites” were based, but intelligence officials, aviation reports and human rights groups say they included Afghanistan and Thailand as well as Poland, Lithuania and Romania.
HIGH-PROFILE PRISONERS
Former CIA officials have said a prison in Poland operated from December 2002 until the fall of 2003 and that prisoners were subjected to harsh questioning and waterboarding in Stare Kiejkuty, a village set in a lush area of woods and lakes. Human rights groups believe about eight terror suspects were held in Poland, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national charged with orchestrating the attack in 2000 on the USS Cole that killed 17 sailors; and Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian terror suspect.
Poland is the only country that has opened a serious investigation into the matter, something which Bodnar says is a sign the 23-year-old democracy is maturing, with prosecutors, journalists and human rights lawyers all trying to seek truth and accountability.
“Poland deserves credit for this step, as the first European state to begin to deal with CIA torture on its own soil,” said Cori Crider, legal director for Reprieve, a British human rights group.
The leaders in office at the time — former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski and former Polish prime minister Leszek Miller — have vehemently denied the prison’s existence.
However, they nonetheless have voiced support for the rendition program in principle, saying that the US and its allies were at war with terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks and that tough measures were needed.
“I will always stand on the side of hurt women, children and the victims of attacks,” Miller said in a radio interview last week. “I won’t shed tears for murderers. A good terrorist is a dead terrorist.”
Even former Polish president Lech Walesa, the iconic democracy fighter, said he is “against torture ... but this is war and war has its particular rules.”
Miller, the head of the Democratic Left Alliance, an opposition party, has been the main target of criticism by political opponents last week. Some even say he should face the State Tribunal, a special court charged with trying state figures.
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