Saturday, August 4, 2012

the moral degeneracy of American political culture than the U.S. torture state

Torture breeds terrorism | Does torture and oppression breed terrorism? Would you if you were….:

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WHEN WILL BUSH BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR WAR CRIMES?? 


This is outrageous and sickening and horrible:


"The government's case for keeping the Guantánamo Bay prisoner locked away seemed airtight. He had confessed to overseeing the distribution of supplies to al-Qaida fighters battling U.S. forces in Afghanistan, even describing the routes where pack mules hauled the packages.
But a federal judge rejected Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah's confessions, concluding that he had concocted them under intense coercion. Even statements that the government insisted Al Rabiah had made under noncoercive, or "clean," questioning were tainted, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled, and she ordered that Al Rabiah be released.
The government has lost eight of 15 cases in which Guantánamo inmates have said they or witnesses against them were forcibly interrogated, according to ProPublica's review of 31 published decisions that resolve lawsuits filed by 52 captives who said they've been wrongfully detained. Because some of the judges' opinions are heavily redacted, it's impossible to be sure there aren't more cases in which the government offered interrogation evidence collected under questionable circumstances. More than 50 such lawsuits are still pending, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court gave Guantánamo inmates the green light to challenge their detention in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Judges rejected government evidence because of interrogation tactics ranging from verbal threats to physical abuse they called torture. Even in the seven cases the government won, the judges didn't endorse aggressive methods. In six, they decided the detainees' stories of abuse simply weren't credible or were irrelevant to the outcome. In one, the prisoner had repeated self-incriminating statements in military hearings, which the judge viewed as less intimidating than the interrogations he found unacceptable.
The 15 decisions offer the most detailed accounting to date of how information obtained from the Guantánamo inmates through controversial tactics is standing up in court. They come in cases initiated by detainees seeking release via a writ of habeas corpus, not cherry-picked by prosecutors. Criminal law experts say the judges' opinions help explain why the government has decided not to pursue criminal convictions against some detainees. Such evidence would pose even greater problems in criminal trials, for which requirements of proof are more demanding.
The Obama administration has already said that at least 48 of the remaining 176 prisoners at Guantánamo will be held indefinitely because they're too dangerous to release but can't be prosecuted successfully in military or civilian court. They've said that coercion-tainted evidence is one obstacle.
In most of the cases the government lost, the judges rejected statements even from the "clean" sessions that the Bush administration began administering in 2002 to collect evidence to use in court. The fear prisoners experienced during improper interrogations bled over to corrupt those statements too, the judges said. In Al Rabiah's case, Kollar-Kotelly found that interrogators fed him incriminating details "that the Government has not even attempted to rely on as reliable or credible," including a story of his handing Osama bin Laden "a suitcase full of money." Then interrogators used "abusive techniques," such as sleep deprivation, threats of torture and other methods described in redacted passages, to get him to admit to them. Al Rabiah is now free in his home country, Kuwait.
"We thought all along that this could happen," said Brittain Mallow, the former commander of the Department of Defense Criminal Investigation Task Force, who supervised the clean interviews from 2002 to 2005. "There was no question in our minds that that would be a defense strategy, to say, 'This person was treated badly, and you can't trust anything he told anyone.' But we didn't control all the interviews of the detainees, so what we could do was limited."
Where the judges draw the line for acceptable tactics affects how interrogators question U.S. prisoners in ongoing hostilities, said Robert Chesney, a former adviser to President Barack Obama's Detainee Policy Task Force. In May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied U.S. captives in Afghanistan the same right to legal review as the Guantánamo detainees, but after three prisoners sought a rehearing, the court this month ruled that they could present new evidence in a lower court to continue fighting their detention.
"You have to assume that, if you're in charge of a detention facility, you're operating in the shadow of these rulings," said Chesney, who teaches national security law at the University of Texas School of Law.
Lawyers familiar with the Guantánamo case files expect many of the remaining habeas cases will also turn on judges' assessments of interrogation evidence.
"I'm not aware of a single case that doesn't rely extensively on statements of detainees," said Philip Sundel, deputy chief defense counsel in the Defense Department's Office of Military Commissions. An administration review recently obtained by The Washington Post supports his assessment: "Much of what is known about such detainees comes from their own statements or statements made by other detainees during custodial debriefings."
At this point, the government has lost 37 of the 53 habeas cases that have been decided, most because it couldn't produce enough reliable evidence that the men were al-Qaida or Taliban militants.
No Do-Overs
The government is borrowing its clean-evidence approach from criminal law, by which prosecutors occasionally succeed in arguing that a change in time, scene or interrogator has reduced a suspect's fears enough that a court should accept his subsequent words as voluntary and true.
But almost no change has been enough to convince judges that the unusual pressures experienced by the Guantánamo inmates had been eased. Many of the detainees were aggressively interrogated at foreign prisons. Once at Guantánamo, each captive was questioned "dozens of times, over the course of weeks and months, by different entities, different persons, different interviewers, sometimes for completely different purposes and with different kinds of questions," Mallow said. Driven to get actionable intelligence, some interrogators used now widely criticized tactics such as prolonged sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, stress positions, threats with military dogs and, as Mallow put it, "experimentation and ad hoc methodologies."
In the 15 decisions ProPublica reviewed, only once did the government succeed in persuading a judge that the taint of coercion had been removed from specific pieces of evidence. Moving detainees from harsh prisons abroad to Guantánamo didn't work, nor did sending in cordial interviewers rather than aggressive interrogators. In some cases, judges still saw taint in "clean" statements taken months or even years after coercive interrogations.
Last year, Justice Department lawyers tried to show that Farhi Saeed bin Mohammedwas an al-Qaida fighter by using statements from another detainee, Binyam Mohamed, whose "harrowing" interrogation ordeal was described in an 81-page opinion by Senior Judge Gladys Kessler. For two years, beginning with his capture in April 2002, foreign interrogators holding him "at the behest of the United States" beat and kicked him, chained him to a wall, kept him half-standing for long stretches and cut him with a blade, including on his genitals. He was "fed information" and "told to verify it." During that time, he was also interrogated by the FBI and CIA.
The government's lawyers didn't contest the allegations of mistreatment but instead argued that the treatment of the informant didn't undermine the evidence he gave later. They submitted statements he'd made after being transferred to Guantánamo, where a U.S. interviewer "developed a relationship with him that was non-abusive and, in fact, cordial and cooperative."
But Kessler didn't buy that better treatment had done the trick. Given that, "throughout his detention, a constant barrage of physical and psychological abuse was employed in order to manipulate him and program him into telling investigators what they wanted to hear," she wrote, it was "more than plausible" that he had also manufactured details in nonabusive questioning.
Had Binyam Mohamed's statements been clean, Kessler suggested, they would have made all the difference in the case against the other detainee, who according to other, reliable evidence had some tie to "a terrorist pipeline." Instead, Kessler ordered in November that Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed be released. The government is appealing her decision.
Binyam Mohamed, the informant whose torture Kessler described so vividly, had already been released. He's now free in Britain, where he has mounted a public campaign to have the British officers he claims were complicit in his torture held accountable.
The U.S. government's bid to block Saeed Mohammed Saleh Hatim's habeas lawsuit met a similar fate. He had confessed to receiving military training from al-Qaida, but later said he'd made up the story in fear of punishment.
Government lawyers didn't contest that Hatim, while held for six months at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, had been beaten repeatedly, kicked and "threatened with rape if he did not confess to being a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida," according to U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina's opinion. Instead, they submitted confessions he gave after arriving at Guantánamo, under cleaner questioning. But Urbina found that Hatim's confession was "tainted by torture" and ordered that he be released. The government is appealing the decision.
Mallow said he never thought the clean-interrogations strategy was surefire: "Do you believe the argument that, if someone was abused as a child, they're going to be affected for the rest of their life? I think it depends on the individual. You don't have an absolute argument that after 30 days that everything you do now is completely separate and clean."
Coercion challenges and other problems with detainees' reliability were pivotal in these cases, because the government had little to show besides questionable interrogation evidence. In Al Rabiah's case, for instance, the government's other proof amounted to statements from four detainees that Kollar-Kotelly rejected as unbelievable and even "demonstrably false." In Hatim's case, the government's other key evidence came from a fellow prisoner who, according to the military's own evaluators, suffered "severe psychological problems," including "psychosis" and "auditory hallucinations." Other judges had already rejected evidence from that informant, Urbina noted.
The Obama administration is appealing five of the eight coercion cases it lost, all to the D.C. Circuit. Three detainees who won habeas cases by alleging forced interrogations have been released, while four who lost have appealed. In at least one case, there is still time for the losing party to file an appeal.
Cleaner Evidence
The six cases the government has won despite a claim of coercion weren't endorsements of harsh interrogations. Rather, the judges ruled in the government's favor because they were skeptical of the detainees' claims of abuse or for other reasons.
Government lawyers scored their most direct victory in the case of Yasein Khasem Mohammad Esmail, convincing U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy that the prisoner had invented much of his claim of mistreatment.
Esmail's lawyers had submitted three ever more elaborate accounts saying he had been threatened with death, thrown from a plane and buried to his neck in the ground, Kennedy said in his April 8 decision. To counter the detainee's claims, the government submitted medical records that undercut his story and produced sworn statements from two U.S. interrogators who denied using or witnessing most of the techniques Esmail described.
In a discussion that took up nearly half his 43-page opinion, Kennedy said he found the interrogators to be more credible than Esmail. Esmail had been "mistreated," he said, but his claims were "exaggerated."
Esmail's legal team consisted of S. William Livingston, Alan Pemberton and Brian Foster of Covington & Burling; David Remes, founder of the nonprofit Appeal for Justice; and Marc Falkoff, a professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law. Remes and Falkoff declined to comment, and counsel at Covington did not respond to e-mails.
Chesney, the University of Texas law professor, said Kennedy's decision was "a big win for the government. It shows that it is possible to rebut claims of torture, that the courts don't simply accept detainees' claims of abuse." But the judge's opinion didn't address the broader question of which interrogation methods will find acceptance in court. The judge thought Esmail was "a little bit abused," Chesney said, but not so abused as to poison the interrogation evidence. "It's bad that the courts are not speaking more clearly about where the line is. Is it torture? Is it cruel and inhuman treatment? Is it any kind of interrogation?"
In upholding the detention of another prisoner, Omar Mohammed Khalifh, Senior Judge James Robertson, now retired, said it was unnecessary to decide whether his interrogation statements were tainted, because the government's other evidence was enough to show he was an explosives instructor for al-Qaida.
The closest the government got to erasing the taint of substantial coercion was in its victory against Musa'ab Omar Al Madhwani. Senior Judge Thomas Hogan said "a variety of harsh interrogation techniques" had tainted 23 interrogation statements the government obtained from the detainee. But Hogan determined that the self-incriminating testimony the prisoner gave during formal military hearings was clean. Two years had passed between the worst abuse and the military hearings, Hogan reasoned, and at the hearings, Al Madhwani apparently spoke voluntarily and had been able to seek help from a military-assigned "personal representative."
The Criminal Arena
If coerced evidence is costing the government wins in the habeas cases, criminal law experts say, it would pose worse problems if those cases were prosecuted in civilian or military courts. The rules for excluding tainted evidence are stricter in both kinds of criminal trials, yet the government's need to marshal evidence is greater. To win a habeas case it need prove only that a detainee is "more likely than not" a member of the enemy, but to win a civilian or military criminal conviction it must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
A death threat alone could undermine a prosecution, if the believability of a prisoner's statement in response to that threat was crucial to the case, said retired U.S. Army Major General John Altenburg, who until November 2006 was in charge of deciding which Guantánamo detainees would face military commission trials. Altenburg is currently of counsel to Greenberg Traurig.
So far, only 24 of the 779 men held at Guantánamo at some point have been charged with a crime to be heard by a military commission. Four of them have been convicted. Only one detainee, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, has been moved from Guantánamo to face charges in a civilian court; that case is currently unfolding in federal court in New York.
A January report by the Guantanamo Review Task Force said tainted evidence was hindering prosecution "in some cases," but that it was not, overall, a "principal obstacle." Administration spokesmen declined to elaborate or to disclose the names of detainees who will not be tried for this reason.
The coercion issue has cropped up in a few high-profile instances. In the case of Omar Khadr, who was 15 when detained in 2002 for allegedly killing a U.S. Army medic in Afghanistan, the judge in his ongoing military commission trial ruled on Aug. 9 that prosecutors may use his confessions despite his claim that he spoke out of fear. In pretrial proceedings, a U.S. interrogator said he'd told Khadr a tale of an uncooperative Afghan teen who was raped by inmates in an American prison.
But a top Bush official revealed to journalist Bob Woodward that Mohammed al-Qahtani, the suspected 20th hijacker of Sept. 11, 2001, couldn't be prosecuted in a military commission because of "life-threatening" torture. And the military case against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Mohamedou Ould Slahi -- who recently won his habeas petition, partly by claiming coercion -- ended in 2007 before formal charges were filed, after the lead prosecutor said that key admissions had been extracted by torture.
Even if the administration doesn't prosecute any more of the Guantánamo prisoners, the legal damage caused by harsh interrogations is likely to keep emerging as their detention challenges move through court. At least 50 more prisoners have filed habeas lawsuits before federal judges in Washington.

7 comments

What an extraordinary record of malfeasance and disproportionate response. The shameful record of these failures, brought about as a direct result of Bush/Cheney regime corruption and its perversion of justice, will live long in our history. Your reports, doggedly following up on the results, form documents that must never be forgotten. Thank you.
And Obama comes along and repeats the same mistakes as Bush. Obama please release these innocent men so they can blow up another building or two and kill some more innocent people and first responders.
It’s amazing to me that the civilian judges are tuned to these kind of egregious activities by Gitmo jailers but the military judge in the Khadr case isn’t.
So now our intelligence community is prohibited from using the tactics our enemies are allowed to use unchecked. Don’t you just love it how the goal posts for our team keep getting moved by our own judges?
Pastor,  That IS the way the game is supposed to be played in a democracy…moving the goal posts to higher standards.
Of course they did.  Most of the “enemy combatants,” which all wars have, including amerikins have been released anyway.  Most, if not all, have done nothing except being Arab, and male.  the US has lied continuously since the beginning trying to and succeeding running a scam on the americunt sheeple.  The US Invaded Iraq without cause, not the other way around.  Now this sick pathetic country has military bases in Iraq, as well as the Largest US embassy in the world.  The US has murdered well over a hundred thousand Iraqi people.  Since they all look alike, there’s no way the stupid bastard amerijerks could identify one from another.  Were I an Iraqi citizen, you’d find me with any weapons I could find, and prepared to kill the white trash from the US.
until the torturers bush and cheny are brought to justise our wonderful republic is just another banana republic   also yoo bibey rumsfeld wolfowitz ashcroft et al
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Newly Released Memo Inadvertently Reveals CIA Held (and Abused) Missing Prisoner

by Dafna Linzer
ProPublica, May 3, 2011, 2:57 p.m.
.(Getty Images)
Update May 3, 2011: According to various reports, a U.S.-held detainee named Hassan Ghul provided key intelligence on the courier who ultimately led authorities to Osama bin Laden. In 2009 we reported that, despite the U.S. government’s silence on his case, Ghul had been captured in Iraq and held in a secret CIA prison. His whereabouts today are still unknown as are those of dozens of others.
This story was originally published on April 16, 2009.
Among the OLC memos released today, one appears to inadvertently reveal that a top al-Qaida suspect captured in northern Iraq in January 2004 was held by the CIA in a secret prison.
After Hassan Ghul was arrested in early 2004, President Bush told reporters: "Just last week we made further progress in making America more secure when a fellow named Hassan Ghul was captured in Iraq. Hassan Ghul reported directly to Khalid Sheik Mohammad, who was the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. He was captured in Iraq, where he was helping al Qaeda to put pressure on our troops."
Military officials and former CIA director George Tenet described Ghul as an al-Qaidafacilitator who delivered money and messages to top leaders.
The U.S. government never publicly discussed Ghul again.
The 9/11 Commission report said Ghul was in "U.S. custody." But the government itself never discussed Ghul’s whereabouts. And the CIA has never acknowledged holding Ghul.
Three years after his capture, human rights groups were surprised when Ghul was not included among 14 high-value detainees who were transferred out of the CIA’s black sites program and sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2007.
Since then, he has been considered a missing, or ghost detainee. But in the heavily redacted OLC memo dated May 30, 2005, government censors appeared to have missed a single reference to his name and confinement during a lengthy description of the interrogation techniques used against him. The reference can be found at the bottom of Page 7 in the memo, where Ghul’s surname is spelled "Gul."
According to the memo, Ghul was one of 28 CIA detainees at the time who had been subjected to the agency’s "enhanced interrogation techniques." Specifically, the memo says he was subjected to "facial hold," "facial slap," "stress positions," "sleep deprivation," a technique called "walling," in which a detainee’s shoulders are repeatedly smashed against a wall, and the "attention grasp," in which the detainee is placed in a choke-hold and slapped.
So it appears we now have evidence Ghul was in a CIA prison. Where he is today is still a mystery.
We’ve called the CIA, and they declined to comment.
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Poles Talk About CIA Prison, Breaking Silence; CIA Murderers Now Under Gun as They Are Exposed

These murdering bastards must be rounded up en masse, interrogated,* and publicly executed for their crimes, no quarter given to treasonous CIA scum; Poland authorities scrambling now attempting to avoid War Crimes chargesAssociated Press
By Vanessa Gera
WARSAW, Poland —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.
CIA "Black Site" in Poland
A heated political debate this week reveals 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 United States 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 U.S. President George W. Bush took against terrorists.
But 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.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Thursday that Poland has become the "political victim" of leaks from U.S. officials that brought to light aspects of the secret rendition program.
Poland drops the dime on CIA "Black Sites" on it's soil
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.
Another CIA "black Site" in Poland where "terrorists"were brought from all over the world to be tortured, killed
"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 U.S. to run the secret site, where terror suspects were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics that human rights advocates consider torture.
CIA "Black Site" at Szczytno, Poland
"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."
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 United Nations 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.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Bush and his CIA could kidnap, torture anyone they suspected of being a "terrorist," including American Citizens, authorization was also given to U.S. "contractors"
A new breakthrough came 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.
Obama could care less if Americans were tortured, murdered
Siemiatkowski has refused to comment, telling The Associated Press he was bound by secrecy laws on the matter. But he did not deny the report.
The issue is hugely sensitive because any Polish leaders who would have cooperated with the U.S. 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.
Former U.S. President George W. Bush writes in his memoir "Decision Points" that he ordered the CIA to subject about 100 terror detainees to harsh interrogation techniques, arguing 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.
War Criminal Blair, MI6 operated CIA "Black Sites" in the UK
Former CIA officials have told the AP that 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 of maturing in this 23-year-old democracy, 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 Polish leaders in office at the time — former President Aleksander Kwasniewski and former Prime Minister Leszek Miller — have vehemently denied the prison's existence.
Ripping a page out of Nazi Gestapo interrogation manual CIA torture toys used on Americans:  Bought and paid for with U.S. taxpayer money
But they nonetheless have voiced support for the rendition program in principle, arguing that the U.S. 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 this week. "I won't shed tears for murderers. A good terrorist is a dead terrorist."
CIA illegal "rendition" sites worldwide; War Criminal Condoleeza Rice approved CIA torture, murder
Even former 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 this week. Some even say he should face the State Tribunal, a special court charged with trying state figures.
Architects of illegal CIA kidnap, torture program:  Bush, Rove
Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, a senator who was the foreign minister when the site operated, said Miller should take responsibility for what happened 10 years ago.
"About a CIA prison in Poland, if it existed, I didn't know," Cimoszewicz said on Radio RMF FM. "But everything indicates that the CIA used a villa in Stare Kiejkuty."
Human rights lawyers and activists welcome the new openness.
"There is some satisfaction here," said Bodnar. "The most important thing is accountability. Intelligence agencies cooperate with each other, but after this they will remember that they need to obey the constitution and that some things they cover up could become public at some point."
Vanessa Gera can be reached at http://twitter.com/VanessaGera.
* The Editor of The 5th Estate hereby volunteers for the job, pro bono.
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Poles Talk About CIA Prison, Breaking Silence; CIA Murderers Now Under Gun as They Are Exposed

These murdering bastards must be rounded up en masse, interrogated,* and publicly executed for their crimes, no quarter given to treasonous CIA scum; Poland authorities scrambling now attempting to avoid War Crimes chargesAssociated Press
By Vanessa Gera
WARSAW, Poland —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.
CIA "Black Site" in Poland
A heated political debate this week reveals 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 United States 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 U.S. President George W. Bush took against terrorists.
But 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.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Thursday that Poland has become the "political victim" of leaks from U.S. officials that brought to light aspects of the secret rendition program.
Poland drops the dime on CIA "Black Sites" on it's soil
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.
Another CIA "black Site" in Poland where "terrorists"were brought from all over the world to be tortured, killed
"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 U.S. to run the secret site, where terror suspects were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics that human rights advocates consider torture.
CIA "Black Site" at Szczytno, Poland
"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."
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 United Nations 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.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Bush and his CIA could kidnap, torture anyone they suspected of being a "terrorist," including American Citizens, authorization was also given to U.S. "contractors"
A new breakthrough came 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.
Obama could care less if Americans were tortured, murdered
Siemiatkowski has refused to comment, telling The Associated Press he was bound by secrecy laws on the matter. But he did not deny the report.
The issue is hugely sensitive because any Polish leaders who would have cooperated with the U.S. 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.
Former U.S. President George W. Bush writes in his memoir "Decision Points" that he ordered the CIA to subject about 100 terror detainees to harsh interrogation techniques, arguing 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.
War Criminal Blair, MI6 operated CIA "Black Sites" in the UK
Former CIA officials have told the AP that 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 of maturing in this 23-year-old democracy, 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 Polish leaders in office at the time — former President Aleksander Kwasniewski and former Prime Minister Leszek Miller — have vehemently denied the prison's existence.
Ripping a page out of Nazi Gestapo interrogation manual CIA torture toys used on Americans:  Bought and paid for with U.S. taxpayer money
But they nonetheless have voiced support for the rendition program in principle, arguing that the U.S. 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 this week. "I won't shed tears for murderers. A good terrorist is a dead terrorist."
CIA illegal "rendition" sites worldwide; War Criminal Condoleeza Rice approved CIA torture, murder
Even former 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 this week. Some even say he should face the State Tribunal, a special court charged with trying state figures.
Architects of illegal CIA kidnap, torture program:  Bush, Rove
Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, a senator who was the foreign minister when the site operated, said Miller should take responsibility for what happened 10 years ago.
"About a CIA prison in Poland, if it existed, I didn't know," Cimoszewicz said on Radio RMF FM. "But everything indicates that the CIA used a villa in Stare Kiejkuty."
Human rights lawyers and activists welcome the new openness.
"There is some satisfaction here," said Bodnar. "The most important thing is accountability. Intelligence agencies cooperate with each other, but after this they will remember that they need to obey the constitution and that some things they cover up could become public at some point."
Vanessa Gera can be reached at http://twitter.com/VanessaGera.
* The Editor of The 5th Estate hereby volunteers for the job, pro bono.
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4 April 2012 Last updated at 06:33 ET

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Forty years in solitary confinement and counting

By Tim FranksRadio 4, Crossing Continents
Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox
As two men in Louisiana complete 40 years in solitary confinement this month, the use of total isolation in US prisons is on the rise. What does this do to a prisoner's state of mind?
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