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Polish probe into alleged CIA jails
Poland's prime minister announced Saturday he was ordering a "detailed" probe into allegations that the CIA ran secret prisons for terrorist suspects on Polish territory. "I am commissioning a detailed check in all places possible to precisely check if there is any proof that such an event took place in our country," Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said in remarks shown on Poland's TVN24 television channel. "It is necessary to finally close the issue because it could be dangerous to Poland," he said.Marcinkiewicz's spokesman, Konrad Ciesiolkiewicz, said he didn't know who would carry out the check and had no details of how the government planned to look into the allegations. More than a half-dozen investigations are under way into whether European countries may have hosted secret U.S.-run prisons in which prisoners were tortured, and whether European airports and airspace were used for alleged CIA flights transporting prisoners to countries where torture is practiced. Polish officials have repeatedly denied that their territory was used in this way. However, Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in remarks published Friday that Poland was the chief CIA detention site in Europe, part of a system of clandestine prisons for interrogating al-Qaida suspects. "Poland was the main base of interrogating prisoners and Romania was more of a hub," Garlasco was quoted as saying in Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. "This is what our sources from the CIA tell us and what is shown from the documents we gathered." Poland's outgoing President Aleksander Kwasniewski reiterated this week that "there are no such prisons or such prisoners on Polish territory." On November 28, he went further, saying, "there never have been" such jails. The Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights watchdog, has also launched an investigation. EU leaders say any member states found to have been involved in such prisons could have their voting rights suspended. In an interview for a Polish newspaper, ex-CIA analyst and State Dept. counterterrorism official Larry Johnson has a theory that after Abu Ghraib, CIA agents do not trust the Bush administration to protect people who simply carry out orders. Hence they are raising alarms about these secret prisons to avoid becoming scapegoats. Posted by: Rafael 2005-12-10 |
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