Press Interpreter

11/04/05 -- From the Americans’ point of view holding Al Qaeda prisoners captive in Poland doesn't make sense. The CIA has a range of other, much safer options for where to locate these camps.

Two days after the Washington Post's and Human Rights Watch's revelations about secret prisons in Poland we still don’t have any, even indirect, proof of their existence. Instead we have a scandal reaching ever-widening circles and already seriously harmful to the image of our country.

What do we know for sure? We know that there are flight logs of a private Boeing jet which the CIA used among other things for transportation of Al Qaeda prisoners to secret prisons scattered all around the world. This plane is thought to have landed on September 22, 2003, at a small airport in Szymany near Szczytno, located a long way from the big cities.

These logs are reliable, because for several months world media, using independent sources, has published and confirmed information about the flights of other Boeing and light aircraft also used by the CIA. If these logs are true, there is no reason to question the credibility of the references to Szymany.

The then airport director Jerzy Kos has spoken about the Boeing landing in Szymany in 2003. He claims such large American machines landed once or several times at the airport. Kos is the same businessman who was kidnapped in Iraq in 2004 and rescued from kidnappers’ hands by American soldiers.

So very probably we can assume that the Boeing belonging to the CIA did really land at Mazury [a region in North-East Poland] in 2003. According to Human Rights Watch activists, that is proof of the existence of secret prisons in Poland. Yesterday this charge was raised both by the spokesman of the Belgian office of that organization and his American colleagues. But neither cited anything aside from the Boeing flight logs.

The case of Boeing in Szymany is very interesting and it would be good to clarify it. The fact itself of the plane's landing doesn’t signify in any way that there were CIA prisons in Poland. We don’t know what the plane landed for –- to tank up, be repaired, put somebody down or perhaps take somebody on board.

Human Rights Watch activists were premature in charging Poland and Romania with hosting such camps. Apart from circumstantial evidence in the form of flight logs, they don’t have any other evidence of their existence. We know that the same plane also landed in 2003 in the Czech Republic and in Sweden, among other places. And these two countries haven't been charged with anything by Human Rights Watch.

For more or less a year the media has reported on CIA secret prisons for Al Qaeda prisoners. Yet they are located in places to which journalists have no access -– in American military bases (for instance Guantanamo on Cuba), on board of aircraft carriers or in countries where there is no or limited media freedom (such as Egypt and Thailand).

From the Americans’ point of view building that kind of prison in Poland makes no sense. A Polish secret service officer has told “Gazeta� [this paper] that Polish media would have known about the existence of that kind of camp 15 minutes after it had been built. There is much truth in that statement, which we may be convinced of every day by the front pages of newspapers. The CIA has a range of other, much safer places to put these camps.

Nevertheless milk has already been spilt. The case has a life of its own and it has risen from the status of a not very reliable story to the proportions of international scandal. The European Commission wants to investigate this case, the International Red Cross demands the right to visit the secret prisons and Poland is presented as a country committing illegal and immoral acts according to the US instructions.

By Bartosz We˛glarczyk and Pawe? Wron´ski

[This article appeared in the Polish newspaper "Gazeta Wyborcza", No.257.4560]

--Translated By Cezary Rogula

Go to original article:

http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/wyborcza/1,34513,3000119.html