Poland was main CIA detention base in Europe:HRW

Poland was the heart of the CIA's secret detention network in Europe, with bases there until recently holding a quarter of the 100 detainees estimated held in such camps worldwide, a human rights group said. Reports of the CIA operating secret jails in Poland and Romania as part of its war on terror have raised controversy on both sides of the Atlantic and dogged U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's European trip this week.

"Poland was the main base for CIA interrogations in Europe, while Romania played more of a role in the transfer of detained prisoners," Marc Garlasco, a leading analyst at Human Rights Watch, was quoted by Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza on Friday as saying. Garlasco said the CIA had set up two detention centers in Poland, which were closed shortly after the Washington Post published an article about secret prisons last month.

He said the allegations were based on information from CIA sources and other documents obtained by Human Rights Watch. "We have leads, circumstantial evidence to check but it's too early to reveal them," Garlasco said. Polish authorities have repeatedly denied the existence of secret jails of any form on Polish territory, with Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkieicz saying this week he would fully cooperate in human rights probes into the allegations.

Poland is one of Washington's leading allies in Europe, where it irked EU heavyweights Germany and France by backing the U.S. war with Iraq and sending troops there. European countries responded to public pressure by seeking answers from Washington before Rice's trip, but quickly retreated in the face of her defense that the United States respected their sovereignty and acted within the law in its war on terrorism.

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=fundLaunches&storyID=2005-12-09T111334Z_01_KRA940138_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-POLAND.xml

was able to remember Poland.

"You forgot tort... err... Poland!"

You'd think they'd know better.

They're in bed with the * administration for a very good reasons (as their govenment reckons). Poland is lobbying very hard for the US to reposition our forces and bases to their backyard. Because this will mean a substantial increase to their Nation's economy.

(In the USA.)

I was just trying to point out that the Polish People are not responsible, like many place (In the USA.) the government usually does something because it knows best.

Kind of hard to believe the Poles, of all people, would be oblivious to the parallels to their shameful history. Do they really want to go down in history as the jailors and hangmen to whichever dictator happens to be on top? Sure not what I'd consider a legacy to be proud of...

First thing I thought of too. :grr:

Chelmno
Treblinka
Sobibór
Majdanek
Belzec
Auschwitz-Birkenau

reactionary. It's like the pendulum has swung all the way to the other side in response to their era of Communism. Scary.

:sarcasm:

There was a whole lot more collaboration than the church would love to portray

Turning in Jews for train rides, rewarded by extra rations

Wow bizarro land can be so fun to visit

How handy.

I live here, and can tell you that they are trying their best to be as badass as the US...always stepped on and always a step behind it seems.

Are they outraged or is it "business as usual"?

They just do grumpy...and racist, xenophobic business as usual. Scratch that, they do get outraged when a gypsie begs for food. Oh, and they would think it was cool if they were allowed to torture brown people.

I know the better people here, and I've yet to meet someone who wouldn't fit this description. I know, it doesn't fit our view of the world, but its true.

... back in the early nineties and was amazed to find skinhead graffiti which read "Cikani do plynu" (Gypsies to the gas). Skinheads would amble into local Czech bars and ask patrons whether they knew where any Gypsies were to be found and the patrons would freely tell them, knowing full well that, if the skinheads found any, they'd beat the crap out of them. It startled the hell out of me, I can tell you. I had always assumed that World War II had taught us all - and especially those European countries most directly involved - a permanent, indelible lesson. Guess I was wrong.

I guess they think tradition can't be maintained without bigotry. It makes me sick.

All the hidden fascists, xenophobes and racists came out of the woodwork with the dissolution of "actually existing socialism" in 1989. It's shameful that the social stigma attached to such behavior was not maintained. Such graffiti would have been unthinkable before 1989.

I'm telling you its a way of thought that pervades the entire population. Not everyone acts on it, but they think it and say it.

That's terribly sad. Given what they went through, you'd think they would have compassion. My family is from the old Czechoslovakia and they are not like that at all. I'm saddened to hear it.

Unfortunately the communists seem to have misused those ideas and, shall we say, did not provide a living example to back up the words. So now its every grumpy, drunken man for himself.

The do not look to the USA as a source of good in the world, because they aren't looking for a source of good in the world.

I think a lot of the replies in this thread are focusing on the lessons taught by the death camps, but forgetting other things that drive Poland.

You're dead on, they do *not* look to the USA as a source of good: in their eyes, the USA, under FDR's leadership, sold them and the rest of eastern Europe down the river by allowing them to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II. While Americans might recoil from that charge and point out, correctly, that a litany of factors in the war created that situation (like the Red Army's overwhelming contribution to the defeat of the Wehrmacht), Poles believe very strongly they were screwed in three different ways - one, by the Nazis and Soviets, two, by the failure of Britain and France to attack and defeat Germany in 1939, and three by the agreements of the "Big Three" that relegated Poland to the control of the Soviets for 45 years.

"What the past taught" Poland is that others consider Poland expendable. The lesson of the war for Poland is that if Poland wants to be independent and survive, Poland better watch out for itself and be bloody ruthless about it. Thus, the contradictory behavior we see now. Poland joins the EU but thumbs their noses at it; Poland joins NATO and engages in potentially dangerous political maneuvering in the backyard of the Russian bear.

These are a people who have been badly treated for a long time. Poland is an abused nation. I hesitate to extend the idea that a nation, like a person, can be abused and become an abuser in turn ... but the current indicators certainly lend credence to that concept.

And those who pointed out the long tradition of intolerance in Europe also know the score. It is really only recently that many of the cherished old traditions of intolerance in western Europe have been challenged and debated openly. It won't go away anytime soon, certainly no faster than the die-hard rednecks in the USA. Eastern Europe is even deeper into this foulness, perhaps because they usually have ended up on the wrong end of the stick throughout history. Maybe the real lesson to all this is how frail and how generally unaccepted are the lessons of the Enlightenment.

Cheers

BH

There are plenty of human rights and other organisations in these countries pressing for justice - but they merely embarrassed their governments, which would have hailed whatever Rice said as sufficient explanation and the end of the matter.

Look at the UK's Jack Straw and Bliar - fully satisfied by the totally unsatisfactory legal sophistry Rice unloaded. As they always intended to be.

after all they went thru with WW2 and after. I feel sorry for the Polish citizens.

the persecuted become the persecuers...

http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/bushies.htm

In 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland ending a dispute over taxes between Consolidated and the Polish government. The Nazis original plan was to replace the workers in Polish factories with Soviet prisoners. However, that portion of the Hitler-Stalin agreement was never implemented. Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation was located near the Polish town of Oswiecim. When the plan to use Soviet prisoners as forced labor fell through, the Nazis began shipping Jews, communists, gypsies and other minority populations to the camp the Nazis had set up. This was the beginning of Auschwitz. The reason Auschwitz was located there was because of the abundant supplies of coal which could be processed into aviation fuel. I.G. Farben soon built a plant near Auschwitz to take advantage of not only of the nearby coal deposits but also of the slave labor supply available at Auschwitz. According to a Dutch intelligence agent, Prescott Bush managed a portion of the slave labor force in Poland.

This is just too coincedental....

Jeebus this is :scary:

...an impoverished and broken Eastern Europe is ready to be manhandled by new masters.

"Meet the new boss, same as the old..."