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In northern Bucharest, in a busy residential neighbourhood minutes from the heart of the capital city, is a secret the Romanian government has long tried to protect.
For years, the CIA used a government building — codenamed "Bright
Light" — as a makeshift prison for its most valuable detainees. There it held
al-Qa'ida operatives Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, and others in a
basement prison before they were ultimately transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006,
according to former US intelligence officials familiar with the location and inner
workings of the prison.
The existence of a CIA prison in Romania has been widely reported, but its
location has never been made public. The Associated Press and German public television ARD
located the former prison and learned details of the facility where harsh interrogation
tactics were used. ARD's programme on the CIA prison is set to air today.
The Romanian prison was part of a network of so-called black sites that the CIA
operated and controlled overseas in Thailand, Lithuania and Poland. All the prisons were
closed by May 2006, and the CIA's detention and interrogation programme ended in
2009.
Unlike the CIA's facility in Lithuania's countryside or the one hidden in a Polish
military installation, the CIA's prison in Romania was not in a remote location.
It was hidden in plain sight, a couple blocks off a major boulevard on a street lined with
trees and homes, along busy train tracks.
The building is used as the National Registry Office for Classified Information, which is
also known as ORNISS. Classified information from Nato and the European Union is stored
there. Former intelligence officials both described the location of the prison and
identified pictures of the building.
In an interview at the building in November, senior ORNISS official Adrian Camarasan said
the basement is one of the most secure rooms in all of Romania. But he said Americans
never ran a prison there.
"No, no. Impossible, impossible," he said in an ARD interview for its
"Panorama" news broadcast, as a security official monitored the interview.
The CIA prison opened for business in the autumn of 2003, after the CIA decided to empty
the black site in Poland, according to former US officials.
Shuttling detainees into the facility without being seen was relatively easy. After flying
into Bucharest, the detainees were brought to the site in vans. CIA operatives then drove
down a side road and entered the compound through a rear gate that led to the actual
prison.
The detainees could then be unloaded and whisked into the ground floor of the prison and
into the basement.
The basement consisted of six prefabricated cells, each with a clock and arrow pointing to
Mecca, the officials said. The cells were on springs, keeping them slightly off balance
and causing disorientation among some detainees.
The CIA declined to comment on the prison.
During the first month of their detention, the detainees endured sleep deprivation and
were doused with water, slapped or forced to stand in painful positions, several former
officials said. Waterboarding, the notorious interrogation technique that simulates
drowning, was not performed in Romania, they said.
After the initial interrogations, the detainees were treated with care, the officials
said. The prisoners received regular dental and medical checkups. The CIA shipped in Halal
food to the site from Frankfurt, Germany, the agency's European centre for operations.
Halal meat is prepared under religious rules similar to kosher food.
Former US officials said that because the building was a government installation, it
provided excellent cover. The prison didn't need heavy security because area residents
knew it was owned by the government. People wouldn't be inclined to snoop in
post-communist Romania, with its extensive security apparatus known for spying on the
country's own citizens.
Human rights activists have urged the Eastern European countries to investigate the roles
their governments played in hosting the prisons in which interrogation techniques such as
waterboarding were used. Officials from these countries continue to deny these prisons
ever existed.
"We know of the criticism, but we have no knowledge of this
subject," Romanian President Traian Basescu said in a September interview with
AP.
The CIA has tried to close the book on the detention programme, which President Barack
Obama ended shortly after taking office.
"That controversy has largely subsided," the CIA's top lawyer, Stephen Preston,
said at a conference this month.
But details of the prison network continue to trickle out through investigations by
international bodies, reporters and human rights groups. "There have been years of
official denials," said Dick Marty, a Swiss politician who led an investigation into
the CIA secret prisons for the Council of Europe. "We are at last beginning to learn
what really happened in Bucharest."
During the Council of Europe's investigation, Romania's foreign affairs minister
assured investigators in a written report that, "No public official or other person
acting in an official capacity has been involved in the unacknowledged deprivation of any
individual, or transport of any individual while so deprived of their liberty." That
report also described several other government investigations into reports of a secret CIA
prison in Romania and said: "No such activities took place on Romanian
territory."
Reporters and human rights investigators have previously used flight records to
tie Romania to the secret prison program. Flight records for a Boeing 737 known
to be used by the CIA showed a flight from Poland to Bucharest in September 2003. Among
the prisoners on board, according to former CIA officials, were Mohammed and Walid bin
Attash, who has been implicated in the bombing of the USS Cole.
Later, other detainees — Ramzi Binalshibh, Abd al-Nashiri and Abu Faraj al-Libi
— were also moved to Romania. A deceptive al-Libi, who was taken to the prison
in June 2005, provided information that would later help the CIA identify Osama bin
Laden's trusted courier, a man who unwittingly led them the CIA to bin Laden
himself.
Court documents recently discovered in a lawsuit have also added to the body of evidence
pointing to a CIA prison in Romania. The files show CIA contractor Richmor Aviation,
a New York-based charter company, operated flights to and from Romania along
with other locations including Morocco and the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
For the CIA officers working at the secret prison, the assignment wasn't glamorous. The
officers served 90-day tours, slept on the compound and ate their meals there, too.
Officers were prevented from the leaving the base after their presence in the
neighbourhood stoked suspicion. One former officer complained that the CIA spent most of
its time baby-sitting detainees like Binalshibh and Mohammed whose intelligence value
diminished as the years passed.
The Romanian and Lithuanian sites were eventually closed in the first half of 2006
before CIA Director Porter Goss left the job. Some of the detainees were taken to Kabul,
where the CIA could legally hold them before they were sent to Guantanamo. Others were
sent back to their native countries. Independent www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/inside-romanias-secret-cia-prison-6273973.html
"To Achieve One World
Government it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism,
their loyalty to family traditions and national identification." (Brock Chisholm - Director of the World Health Organization)
"A society whose citizens refuse to see and investigate the facts, who refuse to
believe that their government and their media will routinely lie to them and fabricate a
reality contrary to verifiable facts, is a society that chooses and deserves the Police
State Dictatorship it's going to
get." (Ian Williams Goddard)
The fact is that "political correctness" is all about creating uniformity. Individualism is one of the biggest obstacles in the way of the New World Order. They want a public that is predictable and conditioned to do as it's told without asking questions.
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." Thomas Jefferson