Via Scott Horton, news that the U.S. Justice Department has refused to assist in a probe by Polish prosecutors of torture allegations at a CIA black site in Poland. From Polish Radio:
The U.S. Department of Justice has rejected a request from prosecutors in Warsaw for assistance in the investigation into the alleged CIA prisons in Poland, where captives claim they were tortured. On 18 March, the Prosecutor’s Office of Appeal in Warsaw filed a motion for legal assistance from the US Department of Justice into the probe.
On 7 October, reports the PAP news agency, the US informed prosecutors that the motion had been rejected on the basis of the international Agreement on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters and that the U.S. authorities consider the matter “to be closed”.
According to the agreement, a country has the right to refuse to provide legal assistance if the execution of the request would encroach on this country’s security or another interest of this country.
The revelation that the US will not be cooperating with the investigation into the alleged black site, thought to have been in northern Poland near the Szymany air base, comes after a second man followed al-Qaeda suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in asking prosecutors in Warsaw to look into his case.
Horton reports that Polish air traffic control has confirmed that the Szymany air base was regularly used by two aircraft identified in the CIA's extraordinary renditions program and that prosecutors "have apparently collected substantial additional evidence that the CIA used the facilities to house and interrogate prisoners."
Public pressure to continue the criminal probe is growing. Polish Radio reports that a new billboard has appeared in Poznan featuring a person hooded and bound to a chair with a tattered American flag in the background. The legend in Polish and English reads “Welcome to Poland—Where they torture people.”
So far, the U.S. Justice Department has failed to comply with its treaty obligations to supply information requested by prosecutors in Spain, Germany, Italy, and Poland who are probing allegations of kidnapping, false arrest, assault, and torture by persons believed to be CIA agents in connection with extraordinary rendition operations.
The WikiLeaks disclosure have revealed a "large-scale, closely coordinated effort by the State Department to obstruct these criminal investigations" in Spain and elsewhere during the Bush administration.
In an excellent post about what the last two years has taught him as a progressive, Mike Konczal zeroes in on the worst aspect of not having a "cleansing of policies" from the Bush era in civil liberties and national security issues: that these corrupt and abusive policies become the norm. "Imagine a military analyst who joins in 2001 at age 25, perhaps in response to 9/11. "If Obama goes a second-term, that analyst will be around 41 when the next President comes, and our current policies of black sites, wiretapping, etc. will just be 'the way things are.'” That would be a disastrous legacy for the Obama presidency.