By Henry Chu

From Los Angeles Times | Original Article

A Polish inquiry on whether the CIA had a secret prison in the country where suspects were brutally interrogated could entangle former top Polish officials.

“The reputation of Poland is at stake,” President Bronislaw Komorowski said recently in reference to the investigation into whether the CIA operated a secret prison in his country last decade. (Alik Keplicz / Associated Press / June 1, 2012)

WARSAW — For years, the idea seemed unthinkable, absurd. A secret U.S. detention center in a remote corner of Poland, where Al Qaeda suspects were brutally interrogated by the CIA? About as likely as "the Loch Ness monster," is how one Pole described it recently.

That monster is now rearing its head.

Cloistered inside government offices, surrounded by classified documents, Polish prosecutors are building a case that could result in criminal charges against the nation's former spy chief and even, some say, against former senior political leaders. Evidence that a foreign power was allowed to conduct illicit activities on Polish soil has deeply shaken many Poles' faith in the United States and in Poland's sense of itself as a successful democracy born from the ashes of the Cold War.

The prosecutors' investigation centers on a Polish military garrison that allegedly hosted a CIA "black site" where foreign detainees were subjected to internationally condemned interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, during 2002 and 2003. The suspects — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks — had either been arrested or snatched under the United States' "extraordinary rendition" program and questioned abroad to avoid American legal standards for interrogations, prosecutors say.

The allegations have already damaged the reputation of the country that Poles thank for helping them to cast off communist oppression. Many now angrily believe the U.S. took advantage of their gratitude, loyalty and eagerness to please by setting up a torture site that it would never have allowed within its own borders.

"It's the kind of thing we expect from Soviet Russia. We remember the Soviet occupation; we remember the German occupation," said attorney Mikolaj Pietrzak, who represents one of the Islamist men allegedly held and questioned in Poland. "The fact that this beacon of liberty which is America would allow this — it's a great disappointment in the United States as the land of the free."

Poland is not the only country in Europe where the U.S. allegedly operated a secret detention facility with at least tacit permission from somewhere within the host government. Black sites are also thought to have existed in Romania and Lithuania, two other developing democracies, as well as in countries in North Africa and Asia.

But Poland is alone among the European nations in having launched an official investigation of the matter.

"The reputation of Poland is at stake," President Bronislaw Komorowski declared in March. "Certainly this is a sensitive and touchy issue, and possibly painful for the Polish state, but it is the task of the legal apparatus to clarify this."

At the same time, a number of lawyers, journalists and rights activists complain that the investigation has been halting, opaque and prone to political meddling because of its potential repercussions for U.S.-Polish relations and for prominent public figures who may have known about the suspected CIA site.

The case has traded hands in the national prosecutor's office at least twice since the investigation began in 2008. Recently, for reasons that are unclear, it was transferred from the office here in Warsaw to the southern city of Krakow.

Pietrzak is frustrated by prosecutors' refusal to give him access to classified files beyond the initial perusal he was granted.

His client, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, is accused of plotting the 2000 attack by Al Qaeda on the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 American sailors. Captured in late 2002 in the United Arab Emirates, Nashiri, a Saudi national, is now an inmate at the U.S. military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

During his interrogation at the suspected CIA black site in northern Poland in 2002 and 2003, at a military base in the northeastern town of Stare Kiejkuty, a gun and a power drill were allegedly pointed at Nashiri's head to make him talk. His lawyer says he was also subjected to waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique that the U.S. has since banned.

Nashiri now awaits trial before a U.S. military tribunal and could face the death penalty, which makes Pietrzak chafe all the more at the pace of the prosecutors' effort here in Poland.

"It's not a robust investigation if it takes you four years," Pietrzak said. "This is the single worst case of human rights violations known in Eastern Europe in the last 20 years.... The public has a right to know."

What the public knows so far has been due in large measure to the dogged work of journalists such as Adam Krzykowski, a reporter for Polish television.

While allegations here of a secret U.S. interrogation site in Stare Kiejkuty were still being dismissed in Poland as fantasy four or five years ago, Krzykowski obtained the flight logs of several jets that landed at nearby Szymany airport in 2003, a facility usually frequented by small private planes carrying visitors to the scenic region of lakes and forests.

"When these aircraft were coming, the air traffic controller was always the same person: It was a military officer who was based 20 to 30 kilometers away," or about 12 to 19 miles, in Stare Kiejkuty, said Krzykowski. "As for border control [agents] who dealt with the aircraft, it was always the same major."

An airport employee told reporters that, on one occasion, the plane parked at the end of the runway in such a way as to block her view of who got off it. Waiting vehicles from the Stare Kiejkuty military base then sped away, their tinted windows preventing any peek inside.

Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003. He has said he believes he was interrogated in Poland because, during questioning, he was given a bottle of water whose label bore an email address ending in ".pl," the Internet country code for Poland.

By 2008, the weight of evidence and public allegations was such that Polish prosecutors felt compelled to launch their own investigation. The country's president, prime minister and other senior officials at the time the secret prison is alleged to have been in operation have all denied knowledge of any black site on Polish soil.

Blame has focused on Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, the former head of Poland's intelligence service. Siemiatkowski several months ago acknowledged being officially named by prosecutors as the subject of their investigation (the prosecutors won't confirm or deny the fact). But he has refused to elaborate, saying only that he is disappointed that the nation he worked for has now turned against him.

Polish news reports say that Siemiatkowski faces possible charges of exceeding his authority and abetting torture by working with the CIA to set up an alleged detention center at Stare Kiejkuty.

Adam Bodnar of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, who is based in Warsaw, said it is hard to believe Siemiatkowski acted on his own authority in an operation requiring coordination among the intelligence service, the military and the border control agency. But chasing responsibility higher up the chain of command, perhaps all the way to the president's and prime minister's offices, could open a can of worms.

Bodnar is also shocked that some of his compatriots defend what allegedly happened at Stare Kiejkuty, including heroes of Poland's anti-communist movement. Former President Lech Walesa, the iconic Solidarity leader and democracy activist, pronounced himself "against torture," but said, "This is war, and war has its particular rules."

"The same guys who helped create the constitution now seem to be approving the violation of the constitution," said Bodnar, shaking his head.

Others fear negative repercussions for Poland's relationship with its most valued ally, the U.S., which has reportedly refused to turn over documents to Polish prosecutors. So far, Washington has not openly expressed displeasure over the investigation.

"If it appears that the Americans were twisting our arms on [setting up a black site] … this would serve as just another argument of how bully-ish the Americans are and how asymmetric the relationship is," said Bartosz Wisniewski, an analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs.

For now, supporters of the investigation wish it would progress faster.

Pietrzak, the attorney, said he was prepared to pursue the case through any avenue possible. If it turns out that senior Polish leaders are implicated in the end, causing political and social uproar, so be it.

"The truth is going to come out sooner or later. The question is whether it's going to come out thanks to Poland, thanks to the active role of the prosecutor, or whether it's going to come out in spite of the prosecutor's failure to act," Pietrzak said.

"It is a hot potato, but I don't care," he added. "This case isn't going away."