CIA Torture "Black Site" for Alleged Terrorists found in Lithuania

[Magda Hassan]

From the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...9111904615

Residents of this village were mystified five years ago when tight-lipped American construction workers suddenly appeared at a mothballed riding stable here and built a large, two-story building without windows, ringed by a metal fence and security cameras.

Today, a Lithuanian parliamentary committee is investigating whether the CIA operated a secret prison for terrorism suspects on the plot of land at the edge of a thick forest for more than a year, from 2004 until late 2005.

Lithuanian land registry documents reviewed by The Washington Post show the property was bought in March 2004 by Elite LLC, an unincorporated U.S. firm registered in the District.

Records in Lithuania and Washington do not reveal the names of individual officers for Elite but identify its sole shareholder as Star Finance Group and Holdings Inc., a Panamanian corporation. There is no record of Elite owning other property in Lithuania.

The company, which has since had its registration revoked by D.C. authorities, in turn sold the property to the Lithuanian government in 2007, two years after the existence of the CIA's overseas network of secret prisons known as black sites -- including some in Eastern Europe -- was first revealed by The Washington Post.

Domas Grigaliunas, a former counterintelligence officer with the Lithuanian military, said it was widely known among the Lithuanian secret services that U.S. intelligence partners had built the site, although its original purpose was kept highly classified.
"It just popped up out of nowhere," he said in an interview. "Everybody knew this was handed to us by the Americans."
Grigaliunas said he was asked in 2004 by the deputy director of Lithuanian military intelligence to develop plans to help a "foreign partner" that was interested in bringing individuals to Lithuania and concealing their whereabouts as part of a covert operation.
He said he made some recommendations but was never told the identity of the foreign partner or whether the operation was carried out. Since then, however, he said he has become convinced that the program involved the CIA's detention centers for terrorism suspects.

Lithuanian officials have also been pressed to investigate by the Council of Europe, an official human rights watchdog, which has conducted its own probe of CIA operations on the continent. Council officials said they had received confidential records confirming that CIA-chartered planes had flown from Afghanistan to Vilnius in 2004 and 2005.

Thomas Hammarberg, the council's commissioner for human rights, said in a telephone interview that flight logs had been doctored to indicate that the planes had touched down in neighboring countries, including Finland and Poland.