Poland ex-president confirms existence of CIA secret prisons

Edited by Rasha Mohamed:
A former Polish president admits that Warsaw had allowed the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to run secret prisons on its territory.
On Wednesday, Poland’s former president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, acknowledged that his country provided the CIA with secret prisons, where al-Qaeda suspects were interrogated by the CIA agents.
“The US side asked the Polish side to find a quiet site, where it could conduct activity that would allow to effectively obtain information from persons who had declared a readiness to cooperate with the US side,” Kwasniewski said.
"We gave our consent to that," he added.
However, he denied allegations that the CIA prisoners in Poland were tortured.
This is the first time that a Polish official confirms the existence of CIA-run secret prisons in the European country.
According to rights groups, eight suspects were kept in the CIA secret prisons in Poland.
Kwasniewski, 60, served as Poland’s president from 1995 to 2005.
He made the remarks a day after the US Senate Intelligence Committee released a damning report on the CIA’s torture program during the George W. Bush administration.
The 6,200-page report is the result of a five-year Senate investigation into the 6.3 million documents reviewing the failures of the agency that ran “the enhanced interrogation” program during the Bush administration.
The CIA’s torture program involved capturing terrorism suspects and shipping them to secret overseas prisons known as black sites, where they were subjected to harsh interrogation torture techniques such as water-boarding.