Post by Jaga on May 24, 2007 19:25:24 GMT -7
A very interesting article. Please check it out. Here is a fragment:
WARSAW, Poland — To describe the tiny town of Szymany as an unlikely focus of the world's attention is an understatement. About 95 miles north of the Polish capital of Warsaw, it is little more than a crossroads with a few shops and houses along the main road in a region covered with dense woods.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the American intelligence agency began using an airfield outside Szymany for transiting terrorist suspects to secret CIA prisons and to countries known to employ torture, according to investigations by an assortment of European governmental commissions and journalists .
Investigators also suspect that Poland, part of what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld termed "New Europe," supportive of the Iraq war and U.S. counterterrorism efforts, has allowed the CIA to use Stare Kiejkuty, a Polish intelligence center that's a 15-minute drive from the Szymany airport, as a detention center for terrorist suspects.
If the allegations are true ¯ Polish officials deny them; American officials won't comment ¯ Szymany and Stare Kiejkuty represent just two of the ways Poland and the United States have worked together in the post-9/11 world:
900 Polish troops, one of the largest non-U.S. contingents in the "coalition of the willing" fighting in Iraq, are slated to remain at least through 2007; 24 Polish soldiers and journalists have been killed in Iraq.
Poland has become one of the largest recipients of U.S. military assistance. In the three years before 9/11, it received just over $33 million in U.S. military training and assistance. In the three years after, the total was nearly tenfold: more than $300 million, mostly in Coalition Support Funds as reimbursement for expenses incurred by Polish forces in Iraq, according to ICIJ's database of military training and assistance.
Poland spent close to $500,000 annually influencing American public opinion in the three years after 9/11 through lobbying, public relations, and trade promotion activities regulated and disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
With Polish support, the U.S. is pressing to place an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe ¯ with radar based in the Czech Republic and interceptor missiles based in Poland ¯ in the event Iran develops missiles and fires them at the U.S. or Europe.
Cooperation has come at a price....
...
www.publicintegrity.org/militaryaid/report.aspx?aid=874
WARSAW, Poland — To describe the tiny town of Szymany as an unlikely focus of the world's attention is an understatement. About 95 miles north of the Polish capital of Warsaw, it is little more than a crossroads with a few shops and houses along the main road in a region covered with dense woods.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the American intelligence agency began using an airfield outside Szymany for transiting terrorist suspects to secret CIA prisons and to countries known to employ torture, according to investigations by an assortment of European governmental commissions and journalists .
Investigators also suspect that Poland, part of what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld termed "New Europe," supportive of the Iraq war and U.S. counterterrorism efforts, has allowed the CIA to use Stare Kiejkuty, a Polish intelligence center that's a 15-minute drive from the Szymany airport, as a detention center for terrorist suspects.
If the allegations are true ¯ Polish officials deny them; American officials won't comment ¯ Szymany and Stare Kiejkuty represent just two of the ways Poland and the United States have worked together in the post-9/11 world:
900 Polish troops, one of the largest non-U.S. contingents in the "coalition of the willing" fighting in Iraq, are slated to remain at least through 2007; 24 Polish soldiers and journalists have been killed in Iraq.
Poland has become one of the largest recipients of U.S. military assistance. In the three years before 9/11, it received just over $33 million in U.S. military training and assistance. In the three years after, the total was nearly tenfold: more than $300 million, mostly in Coalition Support Funds as reimbursement for expenses incurred by Polish forces in Iraq, according to ICIJ's database of military training and assistance.
Poland spent close to $500,000 annually influencing American public opinion in the three years after 9/11 through lobbying, public relations, and trade promotion activities regulated and disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
With Polish support, the U.S. is pressing to place an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe ¯ with radar based in the Czech Republic and interceptor missiles based in Poland ¯ in the event Iran develops missiles and fires them at the U.S. or Europe.
Cooperation has come at a price....
...
www.publicintegrity.org/militaryaid/report.aspx?aid=874
