A declassified CIA report on a terror suspect whom American intelligence services imprisoned and interrogated on Polish territory illegally but with the knowledge and consent of the then Polish president suggest the prisoner “would have cooperated” before he was tortured.
Medical staff who were present when Abu Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding – a simulated drowning technique – said that the suspect’s decision to cooperate “did not correlate” with his torture sessions.
Mr Zubaydah was held at a secret CIA prison in Stare Kiejkuty, in northern Poland, in 2002, along with fellow suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Poland’s former president Aleksander Kwaśniewski initially denied all knowledge of the illegal detentions. He later said he had known about them but had been unaware that US agents were using torture techniques.
The European Court of Human Rights has already ruled that Poland broke the Human Rights Convention by allowing the CIA to hold and interrogate the men.
An earlier report noted that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah were both in “foreign government custody” when they provided information cited by the CIA as evidence that the torture techniques had prevented terror attacks.
American intelligence services used the airport at Szymany, close to the Stare Kiejkuty prison, as a drop-off point for unlawfully detained suspects. Apart from Timisoara in Romania, it was the only European airport used for the purpose. Others were in Algiers, Rabat, Cairo, Amman, Guantanamo Bay, Baghdad, Kabul and Tashkent. Airports used for stopovers for refuelling and taking on CIA personal were spread much more widely, including in Scotland, Ireland, Italy and Greece.
The same report documents “abuses and countless mistakes’”that took place in the interrogation of terror suspects by the CIA between 2001 and 2009, when George W Bush was president of the United States. During the same period, Kwaśniewski and the late Lech Kaczyński were presidents of Poland, and Leszek Miller, Marek Belka, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz and Jarosław Kaczyński were prime ministers.
