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CIA used secret prison in Poland for Torture

347394_CIAThe US Central Intelligence Agency has used a secret prison in Poland in order to torture the suspects that it captured following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

According to former CIA officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity with The Washington Post, two senior CIA officers sealed a deal with Polish intelligence officials that allowed the CIA to use a secret prison – a remote villa in the Polish lake district – in exchange for $15 million.

The CIA had already begun using the secret prison before delivering the money which was in a pair of large cardboard boxes that had flown from Germany to the US embassy in Polish capital, Warsaw, via diplomatic pouch.

The CIA prison in Poland was the first of a trio of the agency’s so-called “black sites,” or secret prisons, in Europe used for interrogating and torturing prisoners captured in covert operations.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks who – alongside four other suspects – faces a possible execution if convicted, was waterboarded 183 times at the CIA’s secret prison in Poland.

Last year in October, James Connell, a lawyer for another 9/11 suspect who is jailed in the notorious US-run Guantanamo prison, criticized the limitations imposed on him for even talking about the torture of his client.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to release parts of a 6,000-page report which, according to the committee’s chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), “uncovers startling details about the CIA detention and interrogation program and raises critical questions about intelligence operations and oversight.”

The release of the report was demanded by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that filed a lawsuit in November against the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

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