CIA Secret Prison In Poland Identified

Nice investigative journalism from the superb Raw Story team.

The CIA operated an interrogation and short-term detention facility for suspected terrorists within a Polish intelligence training school with the explicit approval of British and US authorities, according to British and Polish intelligence officials familiar with the arrangements.

Intelligence officials identify the site as a component of a Polish intelligence training school outside the northern Polish village of Stare Kiejkuty. While previously suspected, the facility has never been conclusively identified as being part of the CIA's secret rendition and detention program.

Only the Polish prime minister and top Polish intelligence brass were told of the plan, in which agents of the United States quietly shuttled detainees from other holding facilities around the globe for stopovers and short-term interrogation in Poland between late 2002 and 2004.

According to a confidential British intelligence memo shown to RAW STORY, Prime Minister Tony Blair told Poland's then-Prime Minister Leszek Miller to keep the information secret, even from his own government.

Go read the rest.

So much for those who said there were no such thing as secret CIA prisons and suggested Dana Priest should be stripped of her Pulitzer. As usual, they belived the Busheviks and as usual they turned out to have misplaced trust - Never were so many misled by so few. Now, as usual, they will be reduced to hiding their gullibility in semantics.

I'm curious as to what EU investigators and the European media - especially the Brit newspapers, where Blair is already in his coffin and begging for further nails - will do with this. Is it too much to hope Congress might lauunch an investigation too?

Update Le Monde's march issue has a warning for European nations complicit in ellegal renditions - and maybe for the Bush administration too - "The Law Will Catch Up With CIA's European 'Accomplices'" (Via Watching America):

This massive violation of human rights couldn’t have happened without the consent of the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Mr. Javier Solana, and those of his associate, E.U. Anti-Terrorism Coordinator Mr. Gijs de Vries. In an eloquent gesture, Mr. de Vries decided to quit: "Democratic states" he warned, "must carry out the battle against terrorism within the framework of respect for the law … Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, military commissions and CIA renditions have undermined the credibility of the United States and Europe."

All those who have participated in these abductions, leaders and their underlings, must fear justice. They should also meditate on the destiny of Maria Estela Martinez, a.k.a. "Isabelle Peron." Peron was the president of Argentina – a country where in the name of counter-terrorism, the authorities practiced the massively abduction of people for political reasons. She was just arrested in Madrid, accused of the "enforced disappearance" of student Hector Faguetti in February 1976, thirty one years ago … Justice is slow, but it must be inexorable.