Secret CIA prison revealed in Lithuania

CounterVortex

The CIA built one of its secret prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former US intelligence official (both anonymous) told ABC News this week. Documents provided by Lithuanian officials showed a now-defunct CIA front company, Elite LLC, bought the property from a family and built the “black site” in 2004, the report said.

Parliamentarians in Lithuania last week voted to launch an investigation into allegations that the CIA operated a clandestine prison near Vilnius airport from early 2004 to late 2005, where high-profile al-Qaeda suspects were interrogated.

“The activities in that prison were illegal,” human rights researcher John Sifton told ABC. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.” Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite declined ABC’s request for an interview. (ABC News, Press TV, Nov. 18; Press TV, Nov. 5)

See our last post on the torture scandal and the secret CIA gulag.

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  1. US used “Soviet methods” in Lithuania
    From the New York Times, Dec. 22:

    MOSCOW — The prime minister of Lithuania, a former Soviet republic that broke from Moscow’s orbit and is now a member of NATO, accused the United States on Tuesday of using “Soviet methods” to set up two secret prisons in Lithuania for terrorism suspects.

    The prime minister, Andrius Kubilius, said the United States had reached what he contended were clandestine and illegal arrangements with the Lithuanian secret services for prisons that were outside civilian control.

    Mr. Kubilius made his remarks on the day that the national security committee in the Lithuanian Parliament released a report that determined that the country was the site of two small secret prisons, though it did not indicate how they were used.