Speculation that Poland hosted secret CIA prisons for terrorists has “put our country in a very uncomfortable political position with our European allies,” Polish Defense Minister Radek Sikorski said in an interview yesterday.
Mr. Sikorski, in Washington for talks with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top U.S. officials, repeated official denials that Poland had been the site of secret prisons, but the furor over the charges continued to roil the Continent.
European Union leaders, saying the prisons violate the bloc’s human rights statutes, have threatened to suspend the voting rights of any member proven to have knowingly hosted the CIA prisons. The threat comes amid intense talks over the next seven-year EU overall budget, considered critical to Poland’s economic development.
“Poland has always seen itself as a good friend of America and a strong member of the EU. This is a controversy we truly do not need right now,” Mr. Sikorski said.
ABC News, citing what it said were current and former CIA operatives, reported Monday that Poland and Romania had housed the secret prisons for al Qaeda terrorists, moving the detainees to another undisclosed facility in North Africa just before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began a fence-mending trip to Europe this week.
Miss Rice, who will visit the EU headquarters in Brussels today, has tried to defuse the controversy, denying the United States engaged in torture or sent suspected terrorists to third countries that did.
She and other U.S. officials insist the global struggle against al Qaeda and other shadowy terrorist groups requires new tactics, and they have hinted that any covert U.S. intelligence operations overseas had been done with the knowledge of the host countries.
EU leaders have written to the State Department seeking information on the prison camps and on reports of CIA transfer flights for terrorists through EU airspace. The Council of Europe, the EU’s human rights arm, has opened its own investigation.
Gijs de Vries, the EU’s top anti-terrorism official, told reporters in Brussels yesterday “there is clearly in Europe at the moment concern in public opinion” about the U.S. balance between fighting terrorism and human rights.
“It is important … that we clarify the situation,” he said.
On another topic, Mr. Sikorski confirmed that the new center-right government in Warsaw may modify Poland’s previous declaration that it would withdraw all of its troops from Iraq by the end of next year.
There are 1,500 Polish troops stationed in south-central Iraq, down from a high of 2,400. Nineteen Poles have been killed in Iraq and the deployment’s $600 million price tag represents a tenth of the country’s overall defense budget, Mr. Sikorski said.
He said the mission has been a success in a number of ways, boosting the ability of Polish forces to cooperate with U.S. troops, raising Poland’s military profile and giving Polish troops excellent on-the-ground training. Security in the Polish-run sector is good and Iraqi forces are increasingly able to handle peacekeeping chores there, Mr. Sikorski said.
“If the rest of Iraq looked like our zone, Iraq would be in pretty good shape,” he said.
He said the new Polish government is considering keeping a training mission and a smaller security force in place in Iraq as an “insurance policy,” with a decision due soon after Iraq’s Dec. 15 parliamentary vote.
“We want to be sure things go smoothly, given the big investment we have made in time, blood and treasure,” he said.
But the minister acknowledged that the Iraq mission had cut sharply into his military modernization budget, at a time when the Bush administration had been demanding that its European allies boost their defense spending.
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