Poland: Selling our soul for our American ally

Jaroslaw Kurski and Piotr Stasinski
Gazeta Wyborcza

Polish officials violated the constitution and international law by allowing the CIA to set up a “black site” prison on Polish soil, said Jaroslaw Kurski and Piotr Stasinski. This newspaper reported two years ago on a secret government memo that mentioned such a prison, where U.S. agents interrogated and “almost certainly tortured” suspected al Qaida members from 2002 to 2005, but Polish officials consistently denied the claim.

Now, after an exhaustive investigation, including numerous interviews with Polish intelligence officers, we can confirm the story. Jerzy Mierzewski, the prosecutor investigating the allegations of CIA prisons here, was summarily fired two weeks ago. Why? We can reveal it’s because he was “about to indict former government officials” on charges of violating the constitution and crimes against humanity.

The United States obeyed the letter, if not the spirit, of its own constitution by refusing to torture people on U.S. territory. But for Polish leaders to allow the Americans to do so here, and then to pretend that they did not know what was going on, “is an affront” to Poles and to our own rule of law. “We must find the courage to publicly admit it.”