WARSAW — Poland’s prime minister said yesterday he has ordered an investigation into whether the CIA ran secret prisons for terror suspects in the country — charges the government repeatedly has denied.
Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said a “detailed” probe would be conducted to “check if there is any proof that such an event took place in our country. It is necessary to finally close the issue because it could be dangerous to Poland.”
Mr. Marcinkiewicz’s spokes-man, Konrad Ciesiolkiewicz, said he did not know who would carry out the investigation.
More than a half-dozen investigations are under way into whether European countries may have hosted secret U.S.-run prisons in which al Qaeda suspects were tortured, and whether European airports and airspace were used for CIA flights transporting prisoners to countries where torture is practiced.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said the United States acts within the law and argued that Europeans are safer because of tough U.S. tactics. She refused to discuss intelligence operations or address questions about clandestine CIA detention centers.
Poland’s outgoing President Aleksander Kwasniewski reiterated last week that “there are no such prisons or such prisoners on Polish territory.” On Nov. 28, he said there “never have been” such jails in Poland.
But the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported yesterday that Gulfstream airplanes belonging to either the CIA or FBI have landed at least five times at the Szczytno-Szymany airport in northeastern Poland since December 2002.
Reports last month that a CIA Boeing 737 landed at the same airport on Sept. 22, 2003, triggered much of the speculation of how Poland has cooperated with the CIA.
Quoting unidentified former airport employees, the paper said yesterday the planes remained on the runway and did not refuel. Only border control officials and minivans approached the aircraft. One former employee said the vans were from nearby Kiejkuty, the site of a training school for Poland’s intelligence services.
A former chief of Poland’s intelligence agency, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, told the newspaper that Poland and American spies had cooperated “intensively” since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“It would be entirely normal if Americans landed in Mazury,” Mr. Siemiatkowski said, referring to the region where both the airport and intelligence school are located.
Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in remarks published Friday in Gazeta Wyborcza that Poland was the chief CIA detention site in Europe, part of a system of clandestine prisons for interrogating al Qaeda suspects.
The London Sunday Telegraph reported today that the European Union permitted the United States to use transit facilities on European soil to transport prisoners in 2003, according to a previously unpublished document.
The document consists of the minutes of the Athens meeting on Jan. 22, 2003, that was subsequently circulated to all member governments, the paper said.
The EU agreed to give America access to facilities — presumably airports — in confidential talks in Athens during which the war on terror was discussed, the original minutes show.
But all references to the agreement were deleted from the record before it was published.
The original minutes contradict repeated EU denials that it knew of flights of U.S.-held prisoners through Europe.
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