Guilty as Charged: Poland Was Involved in CIA Torture

Poland is guilty of taking part in a secret CIA torture program, which had detainees subjected to waterboarding as much as 83 times a month, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has judged.

Poland will pay two detainees, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, €100,000 and €130,000 in damages, respectively. The United States, which is outside the court's jurisdiction, was able to evade responsibility.

It has been alleged that former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski was complicit in the program, which saw detainees subjected to rectal feeding, hung from a ceiling by the wrists for days, and put into coffins and boxes full of insects, among other shocking forms of torture revealed by the 2014 US Senate torture report.

"Who politically is responsible is a subject for an investigation that probably should take place in Poland  right now; the issue should be addressed by the Polish Prosecutor's Office," Piotr Kaczynski, Lecturer at the European Institute of Public Administration in the Netherlands, told Radio Sputnik.

The ECHR's decision comes more than a month after the publication by the US Senate Intelligence Committee of a summary of its investigation into the CIA’s secret interrogation program.

In a July 2014 judgment, the ECHR mentioned Zubaydah and al-Nashiri, who were tortured in a CIA prison on Polish soil in December 2002 and are currently Guantánamo inmates.

The ECHR also said at the time that Poland failed to protect the two men or open an investigation into the matter.