Soviet air bases in Poland labeled secret CIA sites

The CIA operated two secret "black sites" for terrorism suspects in Poland, the main European location for the clandestine operation, according to a Polish press report on Dec. 9. A military expert with Human Rights Watch, which said last month that US intelligence had been using facilities in Poland and Romania to incarcerate and interrogate senior al-Qaida suspects, told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper that about a quarter of 100 prisoners had been held secretly at two former Soviet air bases in Poland. The detainees were said to have been airlifted out of Poland ahead of the recent visit to Europe by Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, whose talks in Brussels, Berlin and Romania have been dominated by the turmoil surrounding alleged CIA torture compounds in eastern Europe. The Washington Post reported five weeks ago that the CIA had been operating secret detention centers in eastern Europe and this week ABC News quoted CIA sources as saying prisoners in Europe had been quickly moved to north Africa to avoid embarrassment during the Rice trip. "Poland was the main base for interrogating prisoners and Romania was more of a hub," Marc Garlasco, of Human Rights Watch, told Gazeta Wyborcza from Geneva. A Swiss official from the Council of Europe, Dick Marty, is investigating the allegations and Poland has promised to cooperate fully with the inquiry, while delivering repeated strenuous denials of any involvement in or knowledge of the CIA operation. Adding to the fight over the illegal torture claims, a second European human rights monitor declared he had witnessed a questionable US detention facility at the large US Camp Bondsteel military base outside Pristina in Kosovo. Alvaro Gil Robles, the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, told the French newspaper Le Monde he had seen a detention facility at Camp Bondsteel similar to the Guantánamo compound. On Dec. 9 the UN human rights ombudsman for Kosovo, Marek Nowicki, spoke of similar experiences. "We have no idea what's going on there," he told the Berliner Zeitung in Germany. "It looked like the pictures we know from Guantánamo." Garlasco said he had learned from CIA sources and unspecified documents obtained by Human Rights Watch that about 25 terrorist suspects were incarcerated at the Szymany air base in northeast Poland and at a bigger air base in southern Poland. He refused to go into detail about his allegations and said his material had been passed to the Council of Europe investigation. "An operation on such a scale could not have taken place without the knowledge of the Polish authorities," he told the Polish newspaper.