Yahoo – AFP,
10 Dec 2014
Poland
allowed the CIA to hold terror suspects on its soil on the condition they
were
"treated as prisoners of war", former Polish President Aleksander
Kwasniewski
said (AFP Photo/Filippo Monteforte)
|
Warsaw
(AFP) - Poland's former president publicly acknowledged for the first time
Wednesday that his country hosted a secret CIA prison where a US Senate report
says torture was used against Al-Qaeda suspects.
Aleksander
Kwasniewski said that as president he put pressure on the United States to end
brutal CIA interrogation at the secret prison on Polish soil in 2003.
"I
told (then US president George W) Bush that this cooperation must end and it
did end," Kwasniewski told local media.
He was
speaking a day after the scathing Senate report revealed the CIA had used
methods amounting to torture to interrogate prisoners after the September 11,
2001 terror attacks.
Kwasniewski,
president between 1995 and 2005, said he raised Polish concerns over CIA
activities in Poland face-to-face with Bush at the White House in 2003.
He said
Bush insisted that the intelligence agency's methods provided "important
benefits in security matters", a claim disputed by the report.
"The
Americans conducted their activities in such secrecy, that it raised our
concern. Polish authorities acted to end these activities and they were stopped
under pressure from Poland."
Kwasniewski
said Poland had agreed to "beefed-up intelligence cooperation" with
the US within the framework of NATO after the September 11 attacks, but
insisted he was unaware the CIA practised torture at its secret facilities.
Poland
allowed the CIA to hold terror suspects on its soil on the condition they were
"treated as prisoners of war", he said, adding that the US never
signed the memorandum of understanding that included this stipulation.
Those who
broke international laws prohibiting torture must be prosecuted, he added.
Taking
responsibility
The
European Court of Human Rights slammed Poland in July for complicity in torture
on its territory of a Palestinian and a Saudi, later sent to the notorious US
Guantanamo Bay base.
The court
concluded Poland had cooperated in the CIA's notorious "rendition"
programme.
The CIA
disputes the findings of the Senate report, which says 119 detainees were
captured and imprisoned in secret CIA "black sites" in countries
whose names were redacted.
Previous
news reports suggested the sites were located in Afghanistan, Lithuania,
Poland, Romania, and Thailand.
Polish
prosecutors have been probing allegations of the secret prison since 2008. They
said they will ask for access to the damning report, as have their Lithuanian
counterparts.
"If
the information proves correct, Lithuania will have to take responsibility,"
President Dalia Grybauskaite said of allegations that it also hosted a secret
CIA jail.
But Valdas
Adamkus, Lithuania's president at the time, on Wednesday denied any knowledge
of such facilities.
"I am
still convinced that there had been no jails and no prisoners from there",
Adamkus, now 88, told AFP.
Human
rights activists said the Senate report confirmed suspicions that Saudi Mustafa
al-Hawsawi was imprisoned at a secret CIA jail in Lithuania in 2005-6.
In 2009, a
Lithuanian parliamentary enquiry identified two sites that may have been used
as CIA black sites.
But it
noted that despite records showing CIA aircraft landed in Lithuania, it was not
possible to say whether suspects were actually brought in.
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