Poland admits participation in CIA rendition program
The Polish authorities have for the first time admitted their involvement in the CIA’s secret programme for the rendition of high-level terrorist suspects from Iraq and Afghanistan.
After years of stonewalling, Warsaw’s air control service confirmed that at least six CIA flights had landed at a disused military air base in northern Poland in 2003.
“It is time for the authorities to provide a full accounting of Poland’s role in rendition,” Adam Bodnar, of the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, said…
For years, European and human rights investigators have believed Poland played a key role in the secret renditions programme, which became a human rights scandal for the George Bush administration…
Scandal as far as the minority of progressive Americans and whole of the world was concerned. For most Americans, the government did it. Must be OK.
The Polish authorities told the investigators they were not aware of flight data that would reveal the traffic in kidnapping.
But following a freedom of information campaign from the Helsinki Foundation and the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative, the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency released flight data showing that at least two of the aircraft used in the CIA operations flew from Kabul and Rabat, in Morocco, to Szymany at least six times between February and September 2003…
“[The Polish aviation authority] collaborated with the CIA by accepting the task of navigating these disguised flights into and out of Szymany airport without adhering to the requirements of international flight planning regulations.
“The most remarkable aspect is that the Polish government, which maintained for more than four years that no such records existed – or that, if they did, they were untraceable – has now provided an apparently comprehensive list of these landings, compiled and presented in an orderly and coherent fashion.”
Must be an election coming soon enough that “transparency” gets a chance – for a while.
Meanwhile, anyone wonder why this didn’t receive much coverage in the American Free Press? See anything about this admission on any of the Fair and Balanced TV networks?
The month’s mendacity award goes to Kwasniewski, Poland’s president at the time who now admits he knew of the flights – but, didn’t know the prison(s) existed. Uh-huh.
Poland has always been a popular location for secret prisons.
For example:
Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek.
Maybe the North American free press and the fair and balanced TV networks were just too ashamed to say anything at all?
Cinaedh
March 1, 2010 at 7:36 am
It’s an “interesting” experience to visit some of those locations. I met shopkeepers in the village near Auschwitz who I am certain missed the affluence of the “good old days” and Nazi largesse.
moss
March 1, 2010 at 7:46 am
I’m of two minds about visiting these “camps”. Their memory should never be allowed to fade away. Yet could I personally deal with visiting the place where so many were murdered?
The renditions were done by the same nation that stressed the civility of trials over retribution that the other Allied nations wanted. Not every Nazi was found guilty in Nuremberg but we can know in our hearts we didn’t fall to their level. We can’t say the same for Guantanamo.
Mr. Fusion
March 1, 2010 at 7:59 am