How Many People Did the CIA Process at Its Stare Kiejkuty “Black Site,” and Where Are They Now?

[marmar]

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.


I’m fascinated to see the Stare Kiejkuty story come alive, because I did some posting on it, back in my salad days, eight years or so ago, back when we were fresh and new and thought electing more and better Democrats was important because they opposed stuff like extraordinary rendition and torture because such things were wrong, not because their guy wasn’t the one doing it (leaving aside the occasional honorable outlier like Ron Wyden). Anyhow, the Stare Kiejkuty story came alive again last week. Reuters:

The CIA ran a secret jail on Polish soil, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on Thursday, piling pressure on Poland, one of Washington’s closest allies, to break its long silence about the global programme for detaining al Qaeda suspects.

The court said it had been established that the CIA used a facility in a northern Polish forest, code named “Quartz”, as a hub in its network for interrogating suspected al Qaeda operatives rounded up after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. …..

Thursday’s ruling was the first time that a court in Europe had said that the CIA operated one of the secret jails – often referred to as “black sites” -on the continent.

The court case was brought by lawyers for two men, Saudi-born Abu Zubaydah, and Saudi national Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who are now both inmates at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. military’s prison on Cuba.

They alleged they were flown in secret to a remote Polish airfield, then transferred to the CIA-facility near the village of Stare Kiejkuty where they were subject to treatment they said amounted to [was] torture. …

The court found Poland violated its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights to prevent torture, ensure the right to liberty, and properly investigate allegations a crime had been committed on its territory.

The ruling from Strasbourg may have implications for other European states alleged to have hosted CIA prisons: similar cases have been lodged with the court in Strasbourg against Romania and Lithuania. …

Let’s not worry about the other torture camps we apparently littered the European landscape with, and focus only on Stare Kiejkuty. Here is the press release from European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and here are the two decisions: Al Nashiri v. Poland and Abu Zubaydah v. Poland. They are lengthy and very detailed. Kevin Gosztola has good background here. (Note that Poland may appeal.)

Now, presumably Ron Wyden is, at some point in the not too distant future, going to manage to get the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s 6300-page report on CIA torture released, either by declassifying it after White House censorship, or, as Mike Gravel suggests, by simply publishing it, uncensored, using the speech and debate clause of the Constitution everybody tells me we still operate under. And although that report will surely include material on Stare Kiejkuty, I don’t see a need to speculate about what’s in it, assuming it’s going to be released anyhow. However, there are two very obvious questions raised by the European Court of Human Rights decision, and I’d like to raise them now, because when the report does come out, they are the questions I’d like to look into first. They’re in the headline:

How many people were processed through Stare Kiejkuty?
Where are they now?

Because, when you think about it: (1) Surely more than two people, Zubaydah and al-Nashiri, were processed, so how many? And if more than two, (2) surely it’s a more than a little remarkable that nobody talked? So where are they? ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/07/many-people-cia-process-stare-kiejkuty-black-site.html