“I went to jail for leaking CIA torture”
And then it refuses to cooperate with the post-action investigation. Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to take a case aimed at allowing two American CIA subcontractors who questioned Abu Zubaida, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to testify before Polish prosecutors about what really happened in this villa. The U. S. government joins the testimony on the grounds that it can reveal classified data. The surreal component of the classified data is that the black site located on Polish soil, a fact that everyone knows. But there are also other, more extensive secrets being sought through Polish prosecutors.
To hear Kwasniewski say, Poland actually had no options yet to accept Bush’s request. The United States, and in particular the CIA, had played a central role in transforming Poland from a Soviet satellite into an American ally. The Bush leadership had promoted German reunification on the condition that the new Berlin government recognize Poland’s western borders, an incredibly vital factor for Polish security. Clinton’s leadership inaugurated Poland’s NATO club in 1999 in the face of Russian opposition. Poland went through complicated negotiations to join the European Union, which nevertheless faced French opposition in 2004.
Kwasniewski was the first ex-communist to be directly elected president of an Eastern European country since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Being ex-communists, he and his prime minister, Leszek Miller, worked harder to be noticed as Poland’s guilty guardians. As Kwasniewski said, accepting Bush’s request “was part of a bigger game. “But the Poles had conditions: First, Miller demanded that the CIA sign a memorandum establishing a fixed point of reparation for detainees. The CIA refused. Miller was involved in the legality of operating a secret criminal on Polish soil and had not notified parliament. (“There’s nothing written,” Miller complained to U. S. officials. “I’m here alone. “) So, secondly, the Poles had to make sure that the CIA would keep the program absolutely secret. This, the CIA promised.
Shortly after the detainees began arriving at a small airport near the facility in December 2002, Polish intelligence agents began to be informed of the village’s internal ill-treatment. The CIA’s call was “advanced interrogation techniques. “The Polish government has discovered a receipt for the structure of a steel cage in a nearby village. When they asked, they were told it was for a tiger, but that’s not why it contained a chemical toilet. “running a criminal camp on Polish soil,” said Jozef Pinior, a Polish politician and human rights activist. Kwasniewski also heard those reports. ” Surely we were scared, we didn’t have access to this building,” he told me. Entry prohibited. “
Psychologists face the consequences of torture
In early 2003, the Poles made the decision to close the mission. In Warsaw, foreign intelligence director Zbigniew Siemiatkowski informed the CIA’s Warsaw station chief that Poland could simply stop operating.
Then, on March 1, 2003, the CIA and the government of Pakistan captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Ambassador Christopher Hill met with Kniewski. ” I told him that the next prisoner is very important, please leave us one more,” Hill recalls. Hill hinted that Mohammed could take Osama bin Laden to the CIA. Didn’t Poland have to participate in this operation?Asked.
Soon, the CIA sent $30 million worth of coins in two huge cardboard boxes through a diplomatic pouch from Frankfurt to the U. S. Embassy in Warsaw. The station chief accompanied the coins to the headquarters of the Polish secret service. There he met through Andrzej Derlatka, deputy head of foreign intelligence, and two subordinates. Deploying several coin counting machines, it took two days to sign the coins. Additional invoices were made to the Polish army’s intelligence organization, WSI, which also participated in the operation.
Derlatka told me that he didn’t charge money to necessarily be similar to the secret prison. The CIA had been subsidizing Poland’s intelligence operations since 1990, when the CIA began joint operations with Poland’s communist-era foreign spy agency. Payment helped. In a telegram to CIA headquarters, the station leader speculated that Poland’s brain replacement was “at least partly attributable to Array. . . to our gift of millions[redacted]. “
Mohammed arrived at the scene in early 2003; The March waterboarding lasted two weeks. During 15 sessions, he did 183 times. The CIA took him out of Poland on March 24, took him to a secret site in Romania and then to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he remains to this day.
A few years later, probably because some U. S. officials believed that “advanced interrogation techniques” were actually torture, they began admitting what had happened in Poland and other black sites to journalists, congressional investigators, and human rights advocates. The program was very controversial. But Bush’s management had never admitted the option of such a leak. When U. S. government resources began leaking data on black sites in 2005, Poles were shocked. In a September 2006 speech, Bush claimed that the United States had maintained secret prisons. Although Bush did not identify express countries, his speech made it even more difficult for Polish officials to become timid. Also, the White House didn’t warn Poland before the speech, Kniewski and Miller told me, “We’re off guard,” Miller said.
In March 2008, under the leadership of a new Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, the Warsaw Public Prosecutor’s Office opened an unscrupulous investigation into allegations that Polish government officials had damaged the law by allowing extrajudicial detentions and handing over part of Poland to a foreign government. The cracks in the armor of government denials began to deepen.
On March 27, 2012, a secret indictment was made public against former intelligence leader Siemiatkowski. Siemiatkowski was reportedly charged with “unlawfully depriving prisoners of their liberty” and authorizing corporal punishment at CIA facilities. Derlatka and Miller. Kwasniewski continued to protect himself: “Of course, everything happened behind my back,” he said in May 2012. Finally, the fees that opposed Semiatkowski seemed to have been eliminated and the Warsaw investigation remained cold.
Torture is a public relations problem
The publication of the U. S. Senate Select Committee on Black Sites Intelligence. USA In December 2014 he led former Preaspectnt Kwasniewski and former Prime Minister Miller, after years of denials, to tell at least part of the truth. At a joint press conference, they declared their participation. in the case. ” The American aspect asked the Polish aspect to locate a quiet place where it could perform an activity that would allow them to download data from other people who had declared themselves in a position to cooperate with the American aspect,” Kwasniewski Kwasniewski and Miller rejected accusations that they were aware of the improved interrogation techniques that had been applied to the prisoners. “We didn’t do it with sadists who didn’t have room to practice their practices,” Kwasniewski said.
In 2014, the European Court of Human Rights issued a landmark ruling against Poland, determining that the country had exposed two detainees, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaida, to a serious threat of torture. A new Polish prosecutor, Janusz Sliwa, reopened the investigation and asked the U. S. Department of Justice five times to help him with his case, which was rejected each time on national security grounds, leading to the Supreme Court case. Sliwa also needs to know if Polish officials were provided in the villa and, if so, who were they?Mitchell and Jessen, the CIA contractors who lived in the villa twice between 2002 and 2003, could locate him. however, if Poland will ever in fact assume its role in the black sites, a role that the Americans have imposed on them.
As one Polish politician said, an alliance with the United States is like marrying a hippopotamus: at first it’s hot and tender, then the hippopotamus turns around, crushes you, and even notices.
Chirping: @JEPomfret
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