Stare Kiejkuty – A Possible CIA Rendition Site in Poland

About 170 km north of Poland's capital, Warsaw, lies a small village known as Stare Kiejkuty.  This village lends its name to an intelligence base that is nearby, and it is that base that has received attention as more information regarding the United States use of “extraordinary rendition” has come to light.

Extraordinary rendition is the practice of moving a person from one state to another, usually without judicial review or oversight.  It is often done in order to avoid or circumvent the laws of the nation performing the rendition, in this case the US.

Despite several years of denials, the Bush administration admitted for the first time in September of 2006 that it had used extraordinary rendition:

In addition to terrorists held at Guantanamo, a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the U.S., in a separate program operated by the CIA.[1]

Although the administration has not revealed the location of these “black sites” used to detain suspected terrorists, many believe that the Polish intelligence base of Stare Kiejkuty, along with the nearby Szymany airport, is one such site.  The BBC reported that it had obtained flight logs for the Szymany airport near the intelligence base and that a Gulfstream jet owned by the CIA had made several landings there.[2]

The Council of Europe's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights issued a report in June 2007 that corroborates the BBC's story.  In the Committee's report, they discovered that at least ten flights flew into the Szymany airport and that six of those flights came directly from Kabul, Afghanistan.  Those arrivals from Kabul happened during the same periods of time that certain High-Value Detainees (HVDs) had been reported to have been transferred out of Afghanistan.  The report goes on to conclude that the CIA flights were deliberately disguised (often with the help of Polish authorities) by filing multiple false flight plans that never mentioned the actual destination: Szymany.[3]
 
Szymany was only the destination airport for these detainees.  From there, the BBC reports, vans were used to take detainees to the Polish intelligence base of Stare Kiejkuty.  The committee's report deduces the same end location for the detainees, though it has been impossible to get official confirmation of that fact.  According to an article in the Deseret News, a former senior airport official at Szymany said that they were not allowed to approach the end of the runway where the planes landed, but vehicles with military registration numbers associated with Stare Kiejkuty would await the incoming flights.[4]

Without official acknowledgement by Polish or American officials, we may never know how many detainees passed through, or may still be in, Stare Kiejkuty.  But we do know that extraordinary rendition requires at least two parties, the host country and the country practicing the rendition, and that the United States along with its Polish allies have managed to keep detainees hidden from judicial oversight for years. 

1:    Fact Sheet: Bringing Terrorists to Justice.  http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060906-2.html
2:    “Hunt for CIA 'black site' in Poland,” Nick Hawton, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6212843.stm
3:    “Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states: second report”, Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, Section IV, subsection iii, paragraph 181
4:    “Report rejects Europeans' denial about CIA activity, ” Brian Knowlton, Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Nov 29, 2006.  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20061129/ai_n16873843