The question has been asked “was the applicant (Mr Al Nashiri) detained in a secret detention facility in Poland? …[was he] subjected to torture … while in U.S. custody on Polish territory?” and the European Court of Human Rights is demanding an answer.
An American diplomatic cable dated December 13th 2005 reads: “[The] rendition and ‘CIA prisons’ issue will continue to dog the Polish government, despite our and the Poles’ best effort to put this story to rest.” The existence of “black sites” in “East European countries” where the CIA practised torture was revealed at the time by the Washington Post. Later Human Rights Watch specifically named Poland along with Romania. Back then the authorities in Warsaw denied everything : no sites, no torture, just “speculation”.
Four years into the investigation in Poland and nine years since the alleged tortures, neither government acknowledges anything much about what amounted to American-Polish complicity in violating basic and inalienable human rights. However, many institutions did their own research on rendition and CIA prisons and none of their conclusions has ever been challenged. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the UN’s Committee Against Torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Inspector General of the CIA, Open Society Justice Initiative and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Warsaw are all in agreement that “stuff happened”.
According to these sources, between December 2002 and September 2003, the CIA flew
