This Times of London story just came out in the last hour:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/...
It basically narrows down the list of countries that could potentially hold the secret Eastern European prison mentioned in today's Washington Post story to two: Poland and Romania.
Key excerpts:
Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria rushed to issue denials of their involvement. But Frantisek Bublan, Interior Minister of the Czech Republic, said last night that the US had approached his Government a month ago about holding suspects on its territory, but Prague had refused.
Human rights groups point at Poland and Romania as two eastern European countries that have taken in America's "ghost detainees". They also claimed that the US was running out of countries willing to host its terror suspects.
....
Tom Malinowski, the director of Human Rights Watch, told The Times that his investigators had tracked CIA aircraft transferring detainees from Afghanistan to airfields in Eastern Europe that are closed to the public and press, including two in Poland and Romania.
Mr Malinowski said that Human Rights Watch was "90 per cent certain" the CIA used Szymany airport in Poland.
"This is an obscure, rural airport which is very close to a Polish intelligence facility," Mr Malinowski said.
He said the second major eastern European site was the Mihail-Kogalniceanu military airbase in Romania.
If this is true, these two countries are going to have hell to pay from the European Union. Poland's already in, but they're likely to get some kind of sanction - perhaps the same type that Austria received when Jorg Haider was voted into power. As for Romania, their EU accession timetable will very likely get a lot longer if this is true....say goodbye to 2007 for sure.
Update: The Financial Times has picked up on this too, adding responses from the Polish and Romanian governments:
Human Rights Watch, a US lobby group, on Wednesday said there was strong evidence - including the flight records of CIA aircraft transporting prisoners out of Afghanistan - that Poland and Romania were among countries allowing the agency to operate secret detention centres on their soil.
“We have a high degree of confidence that such facilities exist in at least Poland and Romania,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director.
If the allegations were confirmed, they would be likely to provoke serious concern in the European Union.
Leszek Laszczak, spokesman for the Polish defence ministry, said: “No people suspected of terrorist activities were held in military bases on the territory of the Republic of Poland, either as a result of an agreement with the US government or with any other institutions of the US.”
A spokeswoman for Traian Basescu, Romanian president, declined to comment.
Update 2: New story in the Guardian, but it doesn't provide any new specifics.
Update 3:The Washington Post now has a follow-up story, also written by Dana Priest, up on the site. No mention of Poland or Romania, but worth reading as a summary of reactions to the initial Post story.