Global Dispatches: Poland—The Wiki-Mergence of Secret CIA Prisons in Poland

WARSAW, Poland—A twisted yarn this week involving Wikileaks, the CIA, and the apparent suicide of a controversial Polish politician.

“There are Talibans in Klewki. They were flown in by helicopter.” (Klewki is a small village in northeastern Poland, population about 1,500).

So crowed Andrzej Lepper, the late leader of a populist Polish peasant’s party known as the Self-Defense of the Republic of Poland party, and former minister of agriculture, perched on the parliamentary lectern about a decade ago. He lambasted the then-political elites for corruption and shady dealings involving Taliban prisoners, including alleged procurement of anthrax and weapons by the Taliban on a Polish farm in Klewki.

The media rushed to articulate what most people were thinking—Lepper was crazy, confabulating, or at best talking nonsense. Those wise in the ways of political marketing dismissed this as another outrageous publicity stunt from a man who was certainly no stranger to controversy and infamous for his particular brand of flamboyant provocation in speech and action.

Lepper had shaved and whipped a debt collector who had come to foreclose on an indebted farm; he’d led groups of protesters to set up roadblocks in protest of what he thought were unfavorable terms of European Union accession; he was convicted of slandering his political opponents; he was accused of accepting bribes to rezone agricultural land for development; and, most recently, he was embroiled in a rather lewd scandal involving the exchange of administrative jobs in his party’s offices for sexual favors, for which he could very well have faced jail time.

Could have, but certainly never will. Andrzej Lepper won’t ever have his day in court now as he was found dead in his party’s headquarters in Warsaw about a month ago. The official version is suicide by hanging, but not everyone is convinced. After all, he did manage to make quite a few enemies on his sensational climb to the top and subsequent meteoric fall from grace.

But it turns out that all those years ago, Lepper was not all that far from the truth about the Taliban in Poland, although he never quite grasped the full picture of secret rendition and clandestine CIA facilities not just in northeastern Poland, but worldwide. And for that matter, neither do we. At least not fully, since governments of both countries aren’t disclosing much about secret rendition or “enhanced interrogation techniques” at clandestine CIA facilities; but Wikileaks has just given us some more food for thought in the form of a juicy U.S. diplomatic leak to digest.

The current breaking news here in Poland is a freshly released U.S. diplomatic communique on Wikileaks that points at efforts by both the Polish and U.S. governments to “keep quiet the issue of secret prisoner rendition and so-called CIA prisons” as they are likely to continue to be a thorn in the side of the Polish government.

By all accounts, this adds to the mounting evidence of such practices and facilities. A BBC article by Steve Swann titled, “What happened in Europe’s secret CIA prisons?” cites Dick Marty, the Council of Europe’s former rapporteur on torture as saying that a senior al-Qaeda suspect, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was in Poland and was tortured. Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s commissioner on human rights, is cited as saying that he believes that “intense torture” was used during CIA interrogations on European soil and that there should be prosecutions.

Truth indeed seems to have turned out stranger than the fiction. Everyone had accused Lepper of confabulating. Meanwhile, we may never quite get to the bottom of the secret CIA prisons nor even the real story of Lepper’s death if it was something other than suicide.

Unless something turns up on Wikileaks, that is.