Thursday, February 25, 2010

CIA Black Site Update: Records Confirm CIA Flights

It's a story the media would seem to want to get its clacking fingers into.  Spies, secret torture bases, alleged terrorists.  Very sexy stuff.  There's only one problem.  The side alleged to have been engaged in this cloak-and-dagger stuff is the United States.  Exposure of such inconvenient facts would belie the United States reputation as an upholder of law and order.  That's why you won't find the Western press digging into the stories and rumors of CIA black sites in eastern Europe.  It just doesn't jive with the accepted narrative.  Despite that, bits and pieces of information do get out there, adding pieces to the puzzle.  The latest being official records confirming that CIA flights did land in Poland, despite previous government denials in Warsaw.

 Ironically, the damning data comes from a government agency, specifically, the Polish Navigation Services Agency.  


There are juicy bits here, including details about at least six landings from February and September 2003 of a Gulfstream and Boeing jet linked to the CIA at the former military airport of Szczytno-Szymany in northern Poland.

According to an AP report, "Poland Civil Air" got a request for "private noncommercial" flights from "a Jeppesen company on behalf of Stevens Express Leasing Inc., of Tennessee.  

On March 25, 2003, the Gulfstream, traveled from Kabul, Afghanistan, with a crew of four and six "passengers" aboard.  After a brief stopover, the plane headed, interestingly, to Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, which, up to this point, has not been named in the CIA black sites or flights.


The planes landing at the northern Polish former military base also included Kabul, Rabat, Morocco, and Constanta, Romania, another country named along with Poland and Lithuania as CIA 'hosts' to black sites used, it is assumed, to torture terror suspects away from watchful eyes, and pesky laws.


Surprise, surprise, the Polish government has nothing to say, continuing a tradition on this topic.  

Why would they?  The Polish government has been less than cooperative about whether the CIA ran a black site in the country, along with Romania, and Lithuania, if not others.

We have two NGOs to thank for the information: the Open Society Justice Initative (funded by global-financial-ghoul-slash-occassional-do-gooder George Soros) and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. 

Adam Bodnar of the Helsinki Foundation said:

"Ever new detail brings us closer to the truth but we cannot say with a 100 percent certainty that there were CIA prisons in Poland."

Bodnar said the report also showed signs of cover-up of the true nature of the flights by listing Warsaw as the destination in Poland and giving false names of the captains. He said the report was made available to his group in September, but was being released now because it took time for the Open Society Justice Initiative in the U.S. to have it analyzed.

Again, Russia Today is one of few news outlets to give this latest bit of news the coverage it deserves.  








As the Informant has reported, Poland is one of Washington's allies-uber-alles in central Europe.  This report gives a sense of that.  


Radek Sikorski, the current foreign minister, is a onetime scholar of the American Enterprise Institute and advised Rupert Murdoch on how best to sink some cash into Poland's choicier bits of old state enterprise. 

Sikorski is gung-ho NATO, formulating the "Sikorski doctrine", which calls for NATO to react adequately to any violation of borders in Europe or in nearby regions. 

In one of his sillier moments, he has advocated bringing Russia into the big NATO tent, though not stated, to try to tame the Russian bear. 

His wife, Anne Applebaum, an American journalist, has spilled lots of ink criticizing Russia.

Don't expect her to be writing anything soon about CIA black sites in eastern Europe.










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