Warsaw has, for a second time in 12 months, rejected a request from the European Court of Human Rights to hand over information involving the alleged existence of secret CIA prisons operating on its territory.
The Polish government said it could not comply with a new request
filed by the European court over the detention of Saudi-born Abu
Zubaydah, who was later transferred to Guantanamo Bay prison,
Reuters reported Tuesday. The officials said their comments might
compromise a Polish criminal investigation.
"The government takes the position that at the present stage
of domestic proceedings, were they to address in detail all the
questions submitted by the court, they could be seen as
interfering with the competencies of the prosecution authority
and the courts," the agency reported the government as saying
in its statement.
Although Poland has been applauded for being the only Eastern
European country to begin its own investigation into claims of
clandestine CIA prisons operating in the country, human rights
activists have expressed their frustration with the lack of
progress in the government’s five-year-old inquiry.
Human rights organizations say the secret prisons served for
"extraordinary rendition" of suspects who were flown in from
around the world without legislative oversight, and were often
tortured.
Any proven participation of Polish officials in the alleged US
intelligence program would be considered a crime under both
Polish and international law.
In 2008, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, while falling short of
admitting Poland’s participation in the CIA program, vowed that
his country would never act outside the boundaries of democracy.
"This is a painful but very clear proof that no politician,
even if hand-in-hand with the biggest superpower in the world,
can do something that will never see the light of the day,"
Tusk said. "We must act calmly, discreetly and in the spirit
of responsibility for the state on this, but we can take no pride
in the fact that such cases must be investigated in Poland."
Five years later, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, the chief of Poland's
intelligence services from 2002 to 2004, was formally charged in
Poland with “depriving prisoners of their liberty” in US
President George W. Bush’s so-called “War on Terror.”
Investigators believe a military base in Stare Kiejkuty,
northeastern Poland, was the location of one of the CIA secret
prisons between December 2002 and September 2003.
Some of the terrorist suspects allegedly transferred through
Poland ended up in Guantanamo Bay, where the conditions are so
deplorable that a 2005 Amnesty International report dubbed it the
"Gulag of our times."
In January 2013, Polish prosecutors awarded Abu Zubaydah, who was
arrested in Pakistan in March 2002 and is now being held in
Guantanamo, “victim status” in the investigation,
following claims he was subjected to extraordinary rendition and
secret detention in Poland.
Zubaydah, whose lawyer says he was detained and tortured for 4 1/2 years in secret CIA prisons in Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Morocco, was one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006.
Zubaydah, however, was eventually told by his US captors that
they had made a mistake in suspecting him of being a leading
member of Al-Qaeda. This was after he had been subjected 83 times
to waterboarding, according to a 2005 US Justice Department legal
memo.
Waterboarding, which has now been universally condemned as a form
of torture, is a technique that leads victims to believe they are
drowning.
"They told me, 'Sorry, we discover that you are not No. 3, not
a partner, not even a fighter,'" said Abu Zubaida, according
to the transcript of a Combatant Status Review
Tribunal.
Another victim of the interrogation technique was Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks
on the United States, who was alleged to have been waterboarded
183 times while being held at Stare Kiejkuty.
More astonishing, however, is how much the president of Poland at
the time, Alexander Kwasniewski, was apparently aware of the
activities between Polish intelligence and the CIA.
In 2011, Gazeta Wyborcza reported that, based on a high-ranking
source in Poland’s Democratic Left Alliance, Kwasniewski only
found out about the CIA “black site” at Stare Kiejkuty, situated
just over 100 kilometers from Warsaw, when Bush personally
thanked him for Poland‘s assistance in the “War on Terror.”
When Kwasniewski subsequently learned that CIA-leased planes had
been flying terrorist suspects in and out of Poland, he ordered
the detention center to be shut down, the sources told the Polish daily.
The newspaper added, however, that Poland’s investigation is
being actively pursued, that Zubaydah's lawyer had access to many
of the case files and that it would provide the European Court of
Human Rights with extracts of the files that were not
confidential.
The US has acknowledged that it had secret prisons around the
world where it detained suspects in the “War on Terror.” Holding
the detainees on foreign territory meant that the individuals
were not entitled to legal protection guaranteed under US law.
Polish officials, meanwhile, still deny the country hosted any US
"black sites," though they say that in 2002 and 2003, CIA
aircraft made illegal flights into an airfield in northern
Poland, near the site of the alleged prison.