Eideard

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.

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.

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.
Daylife/Getty Images/CIA

The Central Intelligence Agency destroyed 92 videotapes documenting the “harsh interrogations” of two Al Qaeda suspects in C.I.A. detention, a greater number of destroyed tapes than the government had previously acknowledged.

The revelation came in a letter filed by federal prosecutors who are investigating the destruction of the tapes by the agency’s officers, which occurred in November 2005.

It had been previously known that officials of the agency had destroyed hundreds of hours of videotaped interrogations, but the documents filed Monday reveal the number of tapes for the first time.

The tapes had been held inside a safe in the C.I.A. station in Thailand, the country where two Al Qaeda suspects — Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — were interrogated…

The order to destroy the tapes was given by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who at the time was the head of the spy agency’s clandestine service. Prosecutors have spent months trying to piece together whether anyone besides Mr. Rodriguez may have authorized the destruction of the tapes, and to decide whether anyone should be indicted in the matter.

The tapes were destroyed at a time when Congress and the courts were intensifying their scrutiny of the agency’s detention and interrogation program.

Only the corrupt and guilty work so hard at trying to prevent the record of their transgressions from seeing the light of day. We all know of their corruption and guilt. But, they can maintain their protestations of innocence as long as they wish to – until proven otherwise.