Polish investigators to ask for access to report on CIA abuses

Polish investigators to ask for access to report on CIA abuses

WARSAW - Polish prosecutors investigating secret CIA prisons in Poland said late Tuesday they will ask for access to the damning US Senate report detailing brutal interrogation of Al-Qaeda suspects.

"We will ask the American side to send us the original of this document," a spokesman for the prosecutors' office in Krakow, Piotr Kosmaty, said according to the PAP news agency.

"It's the first document by a US government body so highly placed, and the Krakow prosecutors' office wants to use it for its investigation," he said.

A redacted, declassified version of the US report released publicly said that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" brought in under the US president at the time, George W. Bush, amounted to torture and yielded no particularly useful intelligence.

The brutality of the techniques the report says CIA interrogators used between 2001 and 2009 against Al-Qaeda suspects - including in unnamed detention facilities outside the US - has scandalised the American public.

Although Poland has never officially admitted hosting one of the CIA "black sites", it was slammed by the European Court of Human Rights in July for complicity in torture on its territory of a Palestinian and a Saudi.

The court's judges unanimously concluded that Poland cooperated in the CIA's notorious "rendition" programme.

The CIA disputes the findings of the US Senate report, which says 119 detainees were captured and imprisoned in secret CIA "black sites" in countries whose names were redacted.

Previous news reports on renditions suggested that the "black sites" were located in Thailand, Afghanistan, Romania, Lithuania and Poland.

This website is best viewed using the latest versions of web browsers.