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IPFS News Link • Central Intelligence Agency

European court finds CIA tortured prisoners at Polish black site

• http://america.aljazeera.com, Crofton Black

For the first time, a court has ruled on the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret prison network in Europe. The European Court of Human Rights on Thursday found "beyond reasonable doubt" that two current prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, were transferred from Thailand to Poland by the CIA and tortured there.

The language in the judgment is damning. Evidence of the prisoners' rendition and treatment is "coherent, clear and categorical." The facts presented by their legal teams "demonstrate" that the Polish authorities knew at that time that the CIA was using Szymany airport and, as a secret detention site, the Stare Kiejkuty military base. The court judged it "inconceivable" that rendition aircraft landed in and departed from Poland, or that the CIA occupied the premises in the Polish base, without Poland being "informed of and involved in the preparation and execution of the [CIA's High Value Detainee] Programme." It concluded that "Poland, for all practical purposes, facilitated the whole process, created the conditions for it to happen and made no attempt to prevent it from occurring." In short, through its "acquiescence and connivance," Poland "must be regarded as responsible" for secret imprisonment, torture and transfer onward to further secret imprisonment.


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