In this damning report for the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly on the CIA's secret detention centers, Rapporteur Dick Marty identifies two countries which allowed the CIA to operate "black prisons" and secret detention centers: Poland and Romania. And these were not just operations whereby the host countries were left in the dark about what was happening. These were "bilateral" arrangements between the CIA and Poland and/or Romania:
"Yet none of these restrictive rules mitigates the fact that Poland and Romania, as host
countries, were knowingly complicit in the CIA’s secret detention programme. When we sought
confirmation from one of our sources in the CIA that these were bilateral (rather than unilateral) arrangements, and that every programme was carried out with the express authorisation of the relevant partner state, we received this emphatic response:
"“One of the great enduring legacies of the Cold War, which has carried into these alliances, is
that NATO countries don’t run unilateral operations in other NATO countries. It’s a tradition
that is almost sacrosanct. We [the CIA] just don’t go trampling on other people’s turf,
especially not in Europe.”" (P. 32).
"Yet none of these restrictive rules mitigates the fact that Poland and Romania, as host
countries, were knowingly complicit in the CIA’s secret detention programme. When we sought
confirmation from one of our sources in the CIA that these were bilateral (rather than unilateral) arrangements, and that every programme was carried out with the express authorisation of the relevant partner state, we received this emphatic response:
"“One of the great enduring legacies of the Cold War, which has carried into these alliances, is
that NATO countries don’t run unilateral operations in other NATO countries. It’s a tradition
that is almost sacrosanct. We [the CIA] just don’t go trampling on other people’s turf,
especially not in Europe.”" (P. 32).
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