CIA operated secret prisons in Romania and Poland

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International Herald Tribune
Report says CIA operated secret prisons in Romania and Poland
By Doreen Carvajal
June 8, 2007 -- PARIS: In a report issued Friday, the lead investigator for the Council of Europe gave a bleak description of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe with information he said was gleaned from anonymous intelligence agents, many of whom wanted to unburden themselves.

Prisoners, guarded by silent men in black masks and dark visors, were held naked in cramped cells and shackled by handcuffs and leg irons to rings attached to walls, according to the more than 100-page report prepared by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator investigating CIA operations for the human rights group based in Strasbourg.

Ventilation holes in the cells released bursts of hot or freezing air, with temperature used as a form of extreme pressure to wear down prisoners, the investigators found. Prisoners were also subjected to water-boarding, a form of simulated drowning, and relentless blasts of music and sound, from rap to cackling laughter and screams, the report says.

The report, which says the prisons were operated exclusively by Americans in Poland and Romania from 2003 to 2006, relies heavily on testimony from CIA agents who justified grim treatment to investigators: "Here's my question? Was the guy a terrorist? 'Cause if he's a terrorist, then I figure he got what was coming to him."

Critics in Poland and Romania attacked Marty's report for its anonymous sources and issued categorical denials, as they have done repeatedly in the past. Denis MacShane, a British member of Parliament and longtime critic of Marty's, complained that the investigator "makes grave allegations to two European Union member states, Poland and Romania, without any proof at all."

Tomasz Szeratics, a spokesman for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said, "We shall not make any comments on Dick Marty's latest report until we receive it officially and analyze the evidence presented. The Polish position remains unchanged and it is very clear: There were no secret CIA detention centers on the territory of the Republic of Poland."

But Marty, who appeared at a news conference in Paris, said the anonymous testimony was backed by thousands of flight records showing a network of prisoner transfers, including private aircraft associated with the CIA that made 10 flights from Afghanistan and Dubai to the Szymany airport in Poland between 2002 and 2005.

Szymany was the closest airport to a Soviet-era military compound where about a dozen high-level terror suspects were jailed, the report charges. The local authorities created secure buffer zones around the jails, which were operated exclusively by Americans, Marty asserted. Lower-level prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq were held at a military base near the Black Sea in Romania, the report charges. The Romanians did not work inside the prison but were restricted to the buffer zone.

"Our Romanian officers do not know what happened inside those areas because we sealed them off and we had control," the report cites a senior military agent as saying. The details of prison life were given by retired and current American intelligence agents who were promised confidentiality, the report says. Their motives were varied, Marty said.

"For 15 years, I have interviewed people as an investigating magistrate and I have always noticed that at a certain point, people with secrets need to talk," Marty said. According to the report, suspects were often held for four months with no contact except with masked, silent guards who would push meals of cheese slices, potatoes and bread through a hatch.

When prisoners resisted, the report says, one investigator considered it a welcome sign. "You know they are starting to crack," he said, "So you hold out. You push them over the edge." A trial that charges American and Italian secret agents with kidnapping a radical imam opened Friday in Milan, in the first prosecution of the contentious U.S. policy of abducting terror suspects for interrogation elsewhere, Ian Fisher of The New York Times reported from Rome.

Nicolò Pollari, the nation's former chief of military intelligence, who contends he is innocent, was not present at the trial, nor were the 26 Americans, all but one operatives for the CIA, charged with planning and carrying out the abduction of the imam, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, on Feb. 17, 2003, in Milan. After the abduction in Italy, Nasr was jailed for four years in Egypt, where he says he was tortured. ♦
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▐ How much money did these countries receive from Washington? -tj