Poland, Lithuania refuse to host new secret CIA jails

Boundary of an alleged US secret prison in Stare Kiejkuty, Poland. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON, WARSAW: Poland and Lithuania announced they would not allow the US to locate new secret prisons on their soil if President Donald Trump chooses to reinstate an old CIA program that detained and interrogated terrorism suspects abroad.
Both eastern European countries are close allies of the US and hosted now-defunct “black site” jails that were used during President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York.
US officials have said Trump may order a review that could lead to the restoration of the program. Similar facilities, where interrogation techniques often condemned as torture were used, were located in Afghanistan, Romania and Thailand.
“There is no proposal for that and there is no room (for talks),” Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo told journalists, when asked if her government would agree to such prisons. “My answer is no.”
Lithuania’s Foreign Affairs Minister Linas Linkevicius told Reuters his country was ready to cooperate with the US on all strategic issues, but that human rights needed to be safeguarded.
“Torturing of people is not possible according to international law, code of conduct — not just legally but morally,” he said in an interview.
“I do not believe that any civilized state should apply these methods. It’s not just my personal position, it’s the position of my state.”
Lithuania faces two lawsuits in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) alleging detainees were jailed at a detention facility it knowingly hosted a decade ago — something never acknowledged by its officials.
Guantanamo Bay ‘jail for
terror suspects’
Reports said Trump is embracing the idea of Guantanamo Bay as a jail for terror suspects, a repudiation of the Barack Obama administration’s longtime push to prosecute captured militants in the US court system.
A draft order spelling out a tougher line in the fight against terror dramatically rethinks how the US should detain, monitor and prosecute terrorist suspects. It would reverse Obama’s efforts to close the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and reopen the idea of establishing CIA detention facilities outside the US.
In its support of Guantanamo the document is likely to renew a debate, which the Obama administration considered closed, about whether military tribunals offshore or civilian trials in American courts offer a fairer and more efficient path to justice.
“To take a step backward would be both practically misguided and morally indefensible,” said Eric Freedman, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra University and a legal consultant for Guantanamo detainees.
“The United States, for better or worse, sets an example for governments and social movements alike throughout the world, and it’s already the case that the groups opposed to American values have made extraordinarily effective use of Guantanamo and its betrayal of American values,” Freedman said.
Though the draft order, which the White House said was not official, takes a more expansive view of national security power, it also in some instances relies on legal authorities that remained in place during the Obama administration but went unused.
Guantanamo was open for the duration of the Obama administration, leaving it available for use by a new administration. And though Obama opted not to indefinitely detain newly captured suspects, courts have recognized the government’s authority to keep without trial suspects captured during wartime and connected to specific terror groups like Al-Qaeda.