EGN NEWS DESK
First got here containers loaded with tools for a secluded property beneath renovation on the sting of the forest. It had housed a horseback using academy and a restaurant, however was being reconfigured for a mysterious enterprise.
Then muscular younger males appeared, jogging by way of the bushes at unusual hours and talking to 1 one other in English.
Juozas Banevicius, who watched the comings and goings within the tiny settlement of Antaviliai, Lithuania, almost 20 years in the past, recalled considering it a bit odd that the newcomers would shoo away anybody who got here near the safety fence that they had put up round their property, which was beforehand open to the general public.
“Nobody knew what they have been doing inside,” recalled Mr. Banevicius, 66.
The reply has been subjected to intense information media and judicial scrutiny within the years since. It has all pointed to the identical conclusion: The village of Antaviliai was residence to a secret C.I.A. detention and torture middle, one in every of three so-called black websites that the company arrange in Eastern Europe after the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults.
In January, the European Court of Human Rights dominated {that a} secret jail code-named Site Violet had “past cheap doubt” been situated in Lithuania. It didn’t identify Antaviliai, which is close to the capital, Vilnius, however the village is the one place within the nation that Lithuanian officers have acknowledged as a web site of a former C.I.A. facility — though they insist it was not a jail.
Site Violet featured in a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014 after an investigation on the C.I.A.’s use of waterboarding and different “enhanced interrogation strategies.” According to the report, the location operated from February 2005 till October 2006, when it closed due to unspecified “medical points.”
The courtroom ruling in January concluded that Lithuania had violated the European Convention on Human Rights “due to its complicity within the C.I.A. secret detainee program.”
Poland, which initially denied internet hosting a secret American jail referred to as Site Blue, acknowledged after the Senate investigation that it had let the C.I.A. maintain terrorism suspects on its territory. The Polish president on the time, Aleksander Kwasniewski, insisted he was unaware of the cruel strategies utilized by American interrogators.
By distinction, a number of courtroom circumstances and investigations have solely bolstered in Lithuania a carapace of official secrecy — and shows of loyalty to the United States by a susceptible Baltic nation terrified of an more and more aggressive Russia.
Lithuania’s well-documented complicity in C.I.A. torture, stated Kestutis Girnius, a historian at Vilnius University, “is just not one thing anybody right here desires to speak about. They buried the entire situation at first and have continued to bury it.”
An enormous purpose for that, he stated, was the dependence of his nation, a NATO member sandwiched between Belarus and the closely militarized Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on the United States for its safety. But, he requested: “Do we actually must be so obsequious? When America says leap, we solely ask, ‘How excessive?’”
Also exasperated is Egidijus Kuris, a Lithuanian judge on the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France. “The proof that there was a jail is clear. The proof that there have been individuals there may be apparent. There’s no pretending right here that it wasn’t,” he stated after a ruling in opposition to his nation in 2018. “And but we nonetheless ask, ‘Do you assume there was a jail?’”
Part of the reason for this, he instructed, was that no one in energy needed to dig into what occurred to a portion of the tens of millions of {dollars} supplied by the C.I.A. to finance a secret jail in Lithuania that the nation’s Parliament discovered was not correctly accounted for. “Whoever pocketed the cash in Lithuania have to be recognized,” Mr. Kuris stated.
In 2009, when ABC News recognized Antaviliai as a former C.I.A. black web site, the Lithuanian Parliament shaped a committee to research. It concluded that the nation’s State Security Department, or V.S.D., had acquired cash for unspecified “joint actions” and that its accounting had been “inappropriate.”
V.S.D. denied this, saying that it had “strictly” accounted for all funds and that “there have been no tens of millions leaked anyplace.”
The parliamentary investigation didn’t attain a conclusion on whether or not the key jail had existed. While flight knowledge and different circumstantial proof indicated that detainees may have been introduced into Lithuania secretly, it discovered, whether or not this had occurred couldn’t be decided.
The closest Lithuania has come to acknowledging that the C.I.A. ran a detention middle on its territory was in 2009, when President Dalia Grybauskaite, who took workplace three years after the Americans had left, stated she had “oblique suspicions” of a secret jail.
If these suspicions have been true, she stated, “Lithuania should cleanse itself, take duty and apologize.” It was additionally time, she added, for the United States “to offer solutions.”
Her feedback dismayed the U.S. Embassy in Lithuania, which had been working efficiently for years to maintain the problem out of the general public eye. It wrote in a cable that was later posted on-line by WikiLeaks that the president had “inexplicably given new life to an unsubstantiated story, reflecting an absence of political seasoning.”
“Rather than assist quiet a narrative that doesn’t replicate favorably on Lithuania, her feedback as a substitute have instructed that there could also be a kernel of fact to the allegations,” the cable stated.
Since then, officers have stayed silent. Talking about Site Violet would elevate questions in regards to the lacking cash and provides materials for propaganda to Russia, which delights in declaring American sins whereas flaunting its personal use of torture, because it did final month with the discharge of video footage exhibiting the brutal therapy of suspects detained in reference to the terrorist assault close to Moscow final month.
In its ruling in January, the European Court in Strasbourg ordered Lithuania to pay 100,000 euros, or about $108,000, to a Saudi citizen who judges decided had been held within the Baltic nation. Lithuania’s Justice Ministry stated final week that it will adjust to the order, saying it was obliged to take action “no matter whether or not it agrees or disagrees with the courtroom’s reasoning.”
The European Court notified Lithuania in March that it had accepted a 3rd case referring to Site Violet. This was introduced by a suspected Qaeda terrorist, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who’s now detained within the U.S. navy jail in Guantánamo Bay and claims he was held and tortured for 5 months by the C.I.A. in Lithuania. He gained earlier circumstances in opposition to Poland and Romania for unlawful detention in these nations.
The Justice Ministry stated it deliberate to problem the brand new claims and argue, because it has beforehand with out success, “that every one the proof concerning the applicant’s detention in Lithuania is oblique and that the requirements of proof must be completely different.”
Site Violet in Lithuania was shut down in late 2006 after native safety officers, cautious of attracting consideration, refused to confess to a hospital a C.I.A. detainee, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who wanted therapy for a medical emergency, in response to the Senate report.
After the C.I.A. left, the property — free of doubtless prying neighbors apart from Mr. Banevicius and residents of a close-by outdated individuals’s residence — was taken over for a time by the Lithuanian safety service, which handed it over to the state property company. That company introduced in 2022 that it will put the location — a protracted, two-story workplace and dwelling space with an enormous barn connected on the again — up for public sale.
It sits on what has develop into invaluable actual property. Once empty land throughout a mud highway from the compound is now dotted with just lately constructed properties for rich Lithuanians looking for nation air and forest calm.
Instead of promoting the location for redevelopment, nonetheless, the property company determined final 12 months to show it over to Lithuania’s jail service to be used as a coaching middle.
Windows have been added to the barn, the place, in response to former detainees cited in European courtroom rulings, prisoners have been saved shackled at midnight and subjected to sleep deprivation, beatings and waterboarding.
A squall of complaints from Poland and different host nations meant that by 2006, the C.I.A. had been compelled to shut all however two of its eight black websites abroad — Site Violet and a second jail in an unnamed nation, in response to the Senate report, which redacted areas. It put the overall variety of prisoners at the moment at 28.
Mr. Banevicius, the neighbor, who was working on the time for the utility firm and noticed how a lot water the previous equestrian middle consumed, stated he by no means noticed or heard any proof of abuse of prisoners. But he all the time suspected there have been extra individuals within the constructing than the joggers and a handful of others he noticed coming into.
“They used a whole lot of water for thus few individuals,” he recalled.
Tomas Dapkus contributed reporting from Vilnius, Lithuania.
