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Poland orders probe into alleged CIA jails
(AP)
Updated: 2005-12-11 10:55
WARSAW, Poland - Poland's prime minister said Saturday he has ordered an
investigation into whether the CIA ran secret prisons for terror suspects in the
country ¡ª an allegation the government repeatedly has denied.
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."
Marcinkiewicz's spokesman, 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-Qaida suspects
were allegedly tortured, and whether European airports and airspace were used
for alleged 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.
Washington continued its policy of not confirming the existence of any
prisons, and declined to offer an opinion about Marcinkiewicz's announcement.
"I'm not going to get into the right of a sovereign country to conduct an
investigation on its own territory," said Frederick Jones, spokesman for the
White House's National Security Council. "That's their right."
Poland's outgoing President Aleksander Kwasniewski reiterated this 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 Saturday that Gulfstream
airplanes belonging to either the CIA or FBI 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, launched much of the speculation of how Poland has cooperated with the
CIA.
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