Poland was main CIA centre in Europe, says rights body

A Human Rights Watch investigator said Poland was the CIA’s main centre to detain terrorist suspects in Europe at clandestine prisons, a Polish newspaper reported today.

Poland’s leaders continue vigorously to deny any involvement.

Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the rights organisation, was quoted by Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza as saying Human Rights Watch had documents corroborating its case about Poland, and showing Romania was a transit point for moving prisoners.

“Poland was the main base of interrogating prisoners and Romania was more of a hub,” Garlasco was quoted as telling the newspaper.

“This is what our sources from the CIA tell us and what is shown from the documents we gathered.”

This week, Poland’s outgoing President Aleksander Kwasniewski stressed that “there are no such prisons or such prisoners on Polish territory.” On November 28, he went further, saying, “there never have been” such jails.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said Poland will open its doors to Dick Marty’s investigation and added that his country was “ready to show everything that moves in Poland to guarantee that there are no prisons or such places in Poland.”

Still, Garlasco was quoted as telling the newspaper, an “operation on such a scale could not have happened without the knowledge of the Polish authorities. There are people who took part in it, there are flight records.”

Garlasco was quoted as telling the newspaper about 25 important terror suspects were interrogated in Poland near a former military airport in Szymany, in northern Poland, and in another much larger facility in the south of the country.

He did not show the newspaper the documents that he said were in his organisation’s possession, but said all relevant material has been passed to Marty, who has been designated by the Council of Europe to investigate.

“We have certain documents, leads, traces to be checked, but it’s too early to reveal them,” Garlasco was quoted as saying.