European Court Says CIA Ran Secret Jail in a Polish Forest

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/07/24/world/24reuters-cia-jails-poland.html

by reirob • 12 years ago

124 45 12 years ago

gambiting• 12 years ago

As a Polish person - I feel really bad that my country has in any way or form participated in this and helped CIA. Our country is known to bend over to America's requests, getting absolutely nothing back, and it upsets me deeply.

leaveyou2• 12 years ago

First, I'm not american and I don't make excuses for the US here but my feeling is that if what Poland gave to US was secret, then it's very likely that what Poland received from US in return is secret too. Apart from that, what we see here is that governments aren't really bounded by laws, treaties nor conventions(not even constitutions). The only thing that bounds a "willing" government is another government with a bigger army or some nukes.

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

The atmosphere in Poland has been rather gung-ho pro American no matter what, this is likely related to the proximity of America's (former?) arch enemy Russia with whom the Poles have an extremely uneasy relationship, mostly due to having been repeatedly run over from the East (as well as the West) in living memory.

See the statements of Polish politicians regarding the missile shield for some good examples of this.

adaml_623• 12 years ago

If it makes you feel better the governments in most countries around the world are quite pathetic when it comes to agreeing to do almost anything for the United States.

Or the IOC (olympics), FIFA, or any company with turnover in the billions, or arms manufacturers, or friends who they went to school with, etc.

There was a thread in HN today about how companies are run so illogically. I think (hope) in the next few decades there will be major changes in governance when the cost of monitoring government activities leads to an increase in transparency and a decrease in illegal and immoral behaviour.

jwr• 12 years ago

Same here. This is deeply unsettling. Given our history and aspirations to high moral standards, we should be ashamed.

I want my country to work with other countries (including the USA), but while respecting human rights.

tomp3• 12 years ago

I don't get it how a court can rule that a <natural fact> can be either true or false.

vidarh• 12 years ago

It doesn't. The court has ruled that for the purposes of the legal process involved, it is to be considered fact.

All it means is that the court believes that the presented evidence meets the pre-requisite standard.

rayiner5• 12 years ago

To expand on your, correct, point, making findings of fact is a way to compartmentalize the aspects of reasoning that lead to a conclusion. If you've ever argued with someone, you know that disputes as to facts or reasoning get mixed together and continually rehashed. But disputes can be broken down into disagreements about what happened, and disagreements of what logically follows from certain premises. Then, resolving each of those disagreements individually, usually by weighing evidence against some standard, ensures forward progress towards a conclusion.

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

If you don't get that then you probably don't get how any court decision is ever possible. The correct interpretation of the headline is that the court found that the evidence documenting this particular fact is strong enough to support the decision to collapse the true/false options to just 'true'.

Courts are messy, they deal with uncertainties all the time, so we ask them to clarify what their view is on the veracity of certain facts and the courts then rule based upon the evidence and their interpretation thereof and then we proceed from that new base of certainty. Of course courts err (miscarriages of justice) but this is a low enough incidence that we continue to believe that when a court rules something is 'true' that it did in fact happen.

Tricky concept, courts! In the end it's still people and people make mistakes but these people are experts trained to sift fact from fiction.

tomp3• 12 years ago

I understand how most court decisions are made, e.g. those involving legality (or morality) of some action. E.g. it's clear to me why a court could find it legal/illegal that the CIA had a jail in Poland.

In this case, however, the court is deciding on facts. I guess what happened here, as vidarh's comment implies, is that the court had some indirect evidence presented, and based on that evidence, ruled that it is more likely than not that the CIA had a jail in Poland (and is concealing the real, definite evidence).

jokoon• 12 years ago

because a court opinion can't be dismissed, while a media one can.

drivingmenuts• 12 years ago

And we'll continue to absolve any American president of war crimes, even though it's become patently obvious that there were war crimes.

We'll hand out punishments to enlisted personnel operating under the aegis of their superior officers, while superior officers avoid serious punishment.

We forgive and forget the lawyers who authored the decisions that allowed this horror in the first place.

And they call us the good guys. More like "the didn't-get-found-out-by-decent-people" guys.

I'll admit to my own days of wanting glass parking lots in war zones or delivering godlike wrath on foreign opposition, but I don't actually have the power to make that happen. I also generally keep it to myself, because hey, coffee solves a lot of problems.

But nobody's even trying to prosecute our officials for their involvement in war crimes.

rayiner5• 12 years ago

Prosecution for "war crimes" is something that only happens if you lose a war. That's not a cynical statement; it falls out of trying to reconcile the concept of "war crimes" with our concept of a world of sovereign nations. Sovereign nations aren't bound by any higher sovereignty that can set rules and subject violators to legal process. The only context in which a nation, or its leaders, can be punished for "war crimes" is when it loses a war and is temporarily inferior to the victors, who can impose prosecution as punishment for conduct during the war.

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

This is simply not true. Prosecutions for war crimes have happened both for winners and losers of wars. The truth, to be more exact, is that the losers are overwhelmingly more prosecuted than the winners (by the winners), but the winners now have the option to be brought before the ICC in the Hague.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court

Of course the chances of countries being signatory to (and having ratified) that particular treaty are roughly proportional to the inverse of their activities regarding such crimes in the recent past.

dalke2• 12 years ago

Mirko Norac "is a former general of the Croatian Army. He was the first Croatian Army general to be found guilty of war crimes by a Croatian court." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirko_Norac )

The Gospić massacre took place in Croatia, and "[t]he trial was seen by a BBC News analysis as indicating a willingness on the part of the Croatian government to deal with war crimes committed by its nationals, following a long period of inactivity described by Rijeka County Court judge Ika Šarić as a "conspiracy of silence"." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospi%C4%87_massacre )

Isn't that a counter-example?

Ahh, you said "a nation, or its leaders", but not other citizens of the nation. So what about Efrain Rios Montt of Guatemala? Quoting Reuters, "He is the first former head of state to be convicted on genocide charges in his own country", and genocide is a war crime.

Isn't that a counter-example?

While it was a civil war, you said war crime only makes sense when a sovereign nation loses a war and is 'temporarily inferior' to another nation, which is not the case in Guatemala. To be certain, the judgement was overturned, but your statement was limited to prosecution, and Rios Montt was definitely prosecuted for war crimes.

contingencies• 12 years ago

WHAT?!??! Illegal kidnapping, torture and demonstrated government complicity: and all I got was this lousy 100,000EUR? They obviously need some decent lawyers.

tptacek2• 12 years ago

This story has no more connection to HN than any other political, human rights, or current events story. There's a whole Internet full of venues to have discussions about these kinds of stories. They don't need to be on the HN front page. Which is why the guidelines say they shouldn't be.

samirmenon• 12 years ago

I thought it was interesting. I imagine that the people who voted it to the front page thought so too.

tptacek2• 12 years ago

The bar is higher than "interesting enough to garner upvotes".

Here's what moderator 'dang said about this issue a few weeks back:

Some of you feel that such stories are so important that the flamewars around them should just be allowed to burn. Our experience and observation suggest the contrary: they are bad—existentially bad—for the site. Like fire in general, they lead to more of the same. So the alternative to the current policy is conflagration. The best aspects of HN, in our view, would not survive this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8012898

TallGuyShort• 12 years ago

And a comment similar to this shows up every time there's a political, human rights, or current events story. Which is why the guidelines also say this:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

vj44• 12 years ago

As a person born in Poland and living in the US, I'm proud that these two countries cooperate to advance common goals, and I can only wish that we work closer together (both openly or secretly).

As to what happened in those secret locations, the European Court is free to investigate (and potentially prosecute) CIA, which is the organization directly responsible. But then, wouldn't it make more sense to go after Guantanamo (or eastern Ukraine these days) first?

European Court Says CIA Ran Secret Jail in a Polish Forest

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