CIA Director Haspel Reported at CIA Torture Site in Poland

by Jeffrey Kaye
Originally posted at Medium.com

Photo: C-SPAN [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

On January 8, Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald reported that Trump’s CIA Director Gina Haspel had possibly been Chief of Base at a CIA black site at Guantanamo in 2003 and/or 2004.

The revelation was drawn from a redacted transcript of a classified 9/11 military commissions hearing on November 16, 2018. The redacted transcript of that meeting quoted Rita Radostitz, a defense attorney for Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), as saying Haspel was “chief of base” at Guantanamo during the time her client had been held in a CIA black site at the Cuba-based facility.

According to Rosenberg, “Chief of base is a CIA term for the officer in charge of a secret foreign outpost.”

Radostitz had joined other military commissions defense attorneys in questioning whether Haspel had engaged in “unlawful influence” pertaining to the prosecution of her client after Haspel became first Deputy Director of the CIA in February 2017, and later was confirmed as CIA director three months later.

Coincidence or not, the ability of Military Commissions defense attorneys to approach CIA officers believed to be involved in or witness to torture of their clients was curtailed after Haspel acquired greater power within CIA.

Strangely, neither Rosenberg or anyone else reporting on the new development noted that Radostitz also claimed that Haspel had been present at yet another CIA black site, this one in Poland.

Detention Site BLUE

Radostitz argued that the inability to question witnesses or speak about classified information attorneys had gathered made it very difficult to defend their clients. In the context of the Poland revelation, Radostitz was asking for permission to present the information about Haspel’s work in Poland to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).

According to the document, Radostitz told the court, “… we request permission to provide information to the Senate Select Committee that Gina Haspel was in Site Blue or #4.” The designation “#4” would seem to relate to where in the sequence of new black sites the Poland site would fall.

“Detention Site Blue” was the name the SCCI gave to the CIA’s Polish black site in their report on the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program.

It is not clear that anyone in Congress ever got Radostitz’s information. Requests for comment from both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, were not returned as of the time of publication.

According to the SSCI report, the Poland site was the scene of unauthorized interrogation methods used on al-Nashiri, including having a gun placed next to his head, and operating “a cordless drill near al-Nashiri’s body.” The CIA officer involved, as well as the Poland black site Chief of Base, were later supposedly disciplined by CIA for these unauthorized actions, and both later retired from the CIA.

But was Gina Haspel present during these events?

During the Senate confirmation process of President Trump’s nomination of Haspel as CIA director, four Democratic senators on the committee wrote to the Director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coats, asking him to “declassify all Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) information related to any involvement by Ms. Gina Haspel, the current Acting Director of the CIA, in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program.”

Photo: From unclassified Guantanamo Military Commissions hearing, Nov. 16, 2018 (pg. 203 of PDF)

Nothing concerning Haspel’s work or presence at any CIA black sites except the “Cat’s Eye” site in Thailand was ever mentioned during Haspel’s confirmation process for CIA director.

Before the SSCI report was released, an important January 2014 article by Adam Goldman at the Washington Post described the Poland secret site, which CIA called code name “Quartz,” after purchasing the old Polish intelligence training site at Stare Kiejkuty, north of Warsaw.

During the approximately 3 years of its operation, “Quartz,” which was supposedly built to house two prisoners, held at least five prisoners, among them KSM, Abu Zubaydah, and alleged USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. According to the Post account, Zubaydah and al-Nashiri were taken to the Polish prison on December 5, 2002.

“The CIA prison in Poland was arguably the most important of all the black sites created by the agency after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,” Goldman wrote.

Photo: Outside the prison grounds at Stare Kiejkuty. Source: mamik / fotopolska.eu [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

In July 2014, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Poland had violated the rights of Abu Zubaydah when he was detained and tortured by the CIA at Stare Kiejkuty.

The legal consequences of the torture continue to mount. According to Charles Church at Lawfare, “As a result of the complicity of both Poland and Lithuania in Abu Zubaydah’s captivity and torture, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that both nations owed him 100,000 euros each.”

According to a Just Security report last year, in May 2018 ECHR also “handed down…judgments in two cases involving European countries that had hosted CIA ‘black sites’ in their territory.” In both cases — Al Nashiri v. Romania and Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania — ECHR found that Poland and Lithuania, “through their cooperation with CIA extraordinary renditions of the applicants, had committed multiple violations of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

New Questions

This new revelation regarding Gina Haspel’s presence at “Site Blue” in Poland, along with the apparent outing of her Guantanamo posting, raise a host of new questions about Gina Haspel’s involvement with the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program. Her presence at Poland and Guantanamo goes along with earlier, well-publicized accounts of Haspel’s posting at the CIA black site in Thailand during the time al-Nashiri was waterboarded there, and her role in the destruction of torture videotapes from the Thai-based CIA prison.

Last December, I broke the story that the CIA’s RDI program was not the only torture program run by the CIA. The article also detailed revelations from a memorandum by the chief of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services showing that the highly-classified and monitored RDI program appeared to hide illegal experimentation on CIA detainees, at least in part under the cloak of “quality control.”

Meanwhile, a separate CIA black site program in Afghanistan (and possibly elsewhere) was conducted without much CIA oversight, especially from medical personnel, as can be discerned from both the testimony of the Chief of CIA’s Office of Medical Services, and from the fragmentary narrative provided in the SSCI Executive Summary of its unpublished investigation into CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

Haspel’s alleged presence at the Poland black site raises the question of possible prosecution of America’s top spy chief for war crimes. Poland is a member of the International Criminal Court, and Haspel could be considered liable for war crimes committed on its territory. (See this analysis.)

In addition, according to legal documents posted online, as of May 2017, there was still an investigation by the Organized Crimes Division of the Regional Public Prosecutor’s office in Kraków, Poland into the operations of the CIA’s black site and complicity by Polish officials.

Drawing on questions former CIA officer John Kiriakou asked in print after the news surfaced regarding Haspel’s work at Guantanamo, one wonders when exactly Haspel was at the Poland black site? Was she involved in the torture of prisoners there? Were videos made of the interrogations and torture, and did Haspel then also destroy them? Did she disclose her time at the “Quartz” black site to the SSCI prior to her nomination hearing?

Given the amount of new information surfacing, the question arises whether or not Haspel committed perjury during her Congressional hearings, or whether or not Congressional personnel colluded with members of the Trump administration, including Haspel, in hiding the totality of her participation in the CIA’s torture program.

The biggest question remains whether there is any political will by those in power to pursue these questions in a legal or political setting, or whether the mainstream press or human rights groups will continue to press the issue at all.

— — — — — — — —

Link to full but redacted transcript below of a November 16, 2018 Military Commissions hearing is taken from the public posting by Carol Rosenberg and the Miami Herald. The actual Military Commissions website posting for the same hearing spans three different URLs, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. The relevant quotes upon which this article relies can be found in the last 10 pages or so of Part Three.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5669992/Redacted-transcript-of-closed-9-11-trial-hearing.pdf

Poland Prosecutor Dismissed After Threat to Indictments Related to US Torture Renditions

Amrit Singh reports from the blog at for Open Society Foundations on a story totally ignored in the U.S., but concerning torture and the U.S. rendition policy delivering so-called high-level prisoners to torture at CIA black site prisons, including one in Poland...

As Poland’s Legacy of CIA Torture Erupts, Europe’s Human Rights Court Must Act

Poland has never officially acknowledged allowing the CIA to hold and interrogate suspects at a secret CIA “black site” in 2002 and 2003, despite a judicial investigation into the affair launched in 2008.

But this week, just days after the visit to Warsaw by President Barack Obama, the issue has erupted into a major political row, after a front-page story in the leading daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza claimed that the prosecutor heading the black site investigation had been removed for political reasons.

The newspaper asserted that the previous prosecutor may have been preparing to charge high ranking [Polish, I believe] officials with crimes against humanity over the human rights abuses that occurred at the site, which included torture and the holding of suspects incommunicado.

On Tuesday, the Polish media additionally reported that Jozef Pinior, a Polish member of the European Parliament, has confirmed the existence of a document signed by Mr Miller regulating the functioning of the secret CIA prison at Stare Kiejkuty. The document, according to Pinior, included establishing what should be done “if a dead body of one of the persons held there should appear.”

His statement —- especially in light of attempts by Poland and the U.S. to evade every measure of accountability for torture and rendition -— further underscores the need for the European Court to swiftly intervene in the case of Guantánamo prisoner Abd-al Rahim al-Nashiri, who was brutally tortured at that prison and now faces the prospect of an unfair trial by military commission followed by the death penalty.

On May 6, 2011, the Open Society Justice Initiative filed a case against Poland on behalf of al-Nashiri before the European Court of Human Rights. The case -— still pending before the Court -— seeks accountability for Poland’s active complicity in al-Nashiri’s torture and incommunicado detention at the CIA prison in Poland, as well as in his transfer from Poland despite the substantial risk of his facing the death penalty in U.S. custody. The case also urges the Court to direct Poland to use all available means to preclude the death penalty in his case.

The governments of Poland and the United States appear to be working hand in glove to evade accountability for torture and rendition. According to Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland and the US agreed that the US would not reply to a Polish request for assistance in the pending Polish investigation, so as to prolong the investigation until the case could be suspended.

Meanwhile, on May 16, 2011, the United States Supreme Court declined to review the last remaining legal challenge to U.S. rendition practices in the case of Mohammed v. Jeppesen, leaving intact the dismissal of the case on grounds of the state secrets privilege.

President Obama lavished praise on Poland during his visit there, declaring Poland “one of our closest and strongest allies,” and a “leader” on the rule of law.

The visit certainly confirms the strength of the alliance between Poland and the United States. But all the evidence suggests that in dealing with the legacy of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program it is regrettably an alliance to subvert rather than uphold the rule of law. U.S. courts have largely ratified such subversions of the rule of law and denied rendition victims their day in court. It is now up to the European Court of Human Rights to lead the way forward.

For more visit the Open Society blog.

9th Circuit Adopts "State Secrets" Defense Against Jeppensen Rendition-Torture Victims

In yet another outrage in the torture scandal, according to an ACLU press release, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, ostensibly the most liberal such court in the nation, has ruled Wednesday in an en banc hearing that the lawsuit of five men kidnapped and tortured by the United States government is dismissed, as trespassing upon "state secrets" privileges by the government. The ruling follows an appeal by the Obama administration, who has proven the worthy successor to the Bush/Cheney executive, striving to keep secret state actions of rendition and torture.

The five men include former prisoner Binyam Mohamed, whose case has been covered extensively by the press, and whose torture is a key reason the government of Great Britain recently announced that there would be an investigation of British collaboration with the United States on the torture and rendition programs. A UK Guardian story reported on protests by the legal charity Reprieve over the appointment of the intelligence-linked Sir Peter Gibson to head the inquiry. I'd made much the same exception to Gibson's appointment in my coverage of the announcement of the inquiry back in July. Of course, the British government claims no conflict of interest for the 76-year-old Gibson, who is Intelligence Services Commissioner, responsible for monitoring secret bugging operations by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ (Britain’s version of the NSA).

The 9th Circuit's final vote was tight, 6-5, and the decision and the dissents are well-worth reading (PDF). But this ruling is an outrage, and another indication of the anti-democratic nature of this supposed democratic state, made more ironic and sickening when you consider that the U.S. military spills the blood of hundreds of thousands, and makes refugees out of millions more, all in the name of spreading "Democracy." It would be funny, if it weren't so... so criminal and disgusting.

Consider this story from just one of the five defendants, Ahmed Agiza, seeking damages against Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc, the Boeing subsidiary that leased the planes used in some of the torture renditions. He was kidnapped by the CIA from Sweden and sent to Egyptian torturers three months after 9/11. Note, too, that Sweden had negotiated with Egypt guarantees of humane treatment (for all of you who believe the Obama administration's claims that getting guarantees regarding conditions of imprisonment and interrogation from "host" countries makes rendition "safe"). From the court's ruling:

Plaintiff Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian national who had been seeking asylum in Sweden, was captured by Swedish authori- ties, allegedly transferred to American custody and flown to Egypt. In Egypt, he claims he was held for five weeks “in a squalid, windowless, and frigid cell,” where he was “severely and repeatedly beaten” and subjected to electric shock through electrodes attached to his ear lobes, nipples and geni- tals. Agiza was held in detention for two and a half years, after which he was given a six-hour trial before a military court, convicted and sentenced to 15 years in Egyptian prison. According to plaintiffs, “[v]irtually every aspect of Agiza’s rendition, including his torture in Egypt, has been publicly acknowledged by the Swedish government.”

From the ACLU press release:

SAN FRANCISCO – A federal appeals court today dismissed a case against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc. for its role in the Bush administration's extraordinary rendition program. The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Northern California filed the lawsuit in May 2007 on behalf of five men who were kidnapped by the CIA, forcibly disappeared to U.S.-run prisons overseas and tortured. The Bush administration intervened in the case, improperly asserting the "state secrets" privilege in an attempt to have the lawsuit thrown out.

In April 2009, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the government must invoke the state secrets privilege with respect to specific pieces of evidence – not over an entire lawsuit. The Obama administration appealed that ruling, and in December the appeal was heard by an en banc panel of all 11 Ninth Circuit judges. According to the ACLU, today's ruling all but shuts the door on accountability for the illegal program. The ACLU intends to seek Supreme Court review of the decision.

The following can be attributed to Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU, who argued the case before the Ninth Circuit:

"This is a sad day not only for the torture victims whose attempt to seek justice has been extinguished, but for all Americans who care about the rule of law and our nation's reputation in the world. To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration's torture program has had his day in court. If today's decision is allowed to stand, the United States will have closed its courtroom doors to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers. The torture architects and their enablers may have escaped the judgment of this court, but they will not escape the judgment of history."

Attorneys on the case are Wizner, Steven Watt, Steven R. Shapiro and Jameel Jaffer of the national ACLU, Julia Harumi Mass of the ACLU of Northern California, Paul Hoffman of the law firm Schonbrun DeSimone Seplow Harris & Hoffman LLP and Hope Metcalf of the Yale Law School Lowenstein Clinic. In addition, Margaret L. Satterthwaite and Amna Akbar of the International Human Rights Clinic of New York University School of Law and Clive Stafford-Smith and Zachary Katznelson represent plaintiffs in this case.

Others are responding to this terrible decision by the Ninth Circuit, including Marcy Wheeler, Nick Baumann, Josh Gerstein, and Garrett at Daily Kos. For more on the rendition story, see my article at Firedoglake last July, UK on U.S. Rendition: “Is it clear that detention, rather than killing, is the objective of the operation?” For an even longer historical perspective, read The Real Roots of the CIA's Rendition and Black Sites Program by H.P. Albarelli and Jeffrey Kaye, published at Truthout.org last February.

Bottom line? Ben Wizner described it well, calling it a sad, sad day for all torture victims, as well as those who care about the rule of law. Marcy Wheeler put it more acerbicly:

So basically, the government can kidnap you and send you to be tortured – as they did with Binyam Mohamed – yet even if your contractors acknowledge what they were doing, if the government wants to call their own law-breaking a secret, the most liberal Circuit Court in the country agrees they can.

In a related story, see Adam Goldman's AP piece on the torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at a CIA black site prison in Poland, where he had been sent via rendition back in 2002 and 2003. Al-Nashiri famously had both a gun and a drill held threateningly to his head during the torture. Ostensibly, according to the article, the torturer in question was an ex-FBI agent and CIA interrogator named "Albert." The article looks meant to warn DoJ prosecutor John Durham not to bother with a prosecution of the CIA agents involved, as doing so would open a can of worms, since previously DoJ declined prosecution, and "Albert" went on to work for the CIA for years after his "reprimand" in the Nashiri case.

As al-Nashiri's attorney said about her client's case:

"Terrorizing a hooded, shackled prisoner is torture," [Nancy] Hollander said. "I will do everything in my power to make sure the world knows that agents of the U.S. government tortured my client and have now held him in violation of U.S. and international law for over eight years."