For sale: CIA ‘black site’ where terror suspects were tortured in Lithuania | Lithuania

A menacing steel barn on the outskirts of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, where CIA terror suspects were once held in solitary confinement, subject to constant light and high-intensity noise, is soon going on the market.

The government real estate fund, which handles assets no longer needed by the state, said Monday it was preparing to sell the notorious former “black site,” known as Project No 2 or the Violet Detention Site, for a price yet to come. unknown.

As part of Washington’s secret “extraordinary rendition” program, in which suspected Islamist militants from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were captured and held in jails outside the US, the 10-room building served as a arrest in 2005 and 2006.

In its windowless and soundproofed rooms, “one could do whatever one wanted,” Arvydas Anusauskas, who led a Lithuanian parliamentary inquiry into the site in 2010, told Reuters. “What exactly was going on there, we did not determine.”

Lithuania’s main tourist attraction is a former Russian KGB prison in the center of Vilnius, where 767 people were executed during an anti-Soviet uprising in the 1940s and thousands were tortured, but there are no plans to convert the former KGB facility. CIA, which has its own power generator. and water supply, in a museum.

“We didn’t press any buttons, so we didn’t turn anything on by accident,” a real-estate fund employee said of the facility, where fluorescent lighting and the hum of the air conditioner dominate the now-empty rooms.

The European court of human rights heard in 2018 that prisoners at the site, used as a training center by Lithuania’s intelligence service from 2007 to 2018, were shaved on arrival and blindfolded or hooded, with their legs chained.

Earlier this month it was revealed that the Lithuanian government had paid Abu Zubaydah, the so-called “eternal prisoner”, 100,000 euros ($113,319) in compensation for his treatment at the site, after the court ruled that the government had violated European laws. laws prohibiting torture.

Zubaydah, was captured in Pakistan six months after 9/11, accused of being a senior member of al-Qaida, and has been held without charge ever since. It is unlikely that he suffered the more brutal forms of torture in Lithuania that the CIA applied elsewhere (he was subjected to mock drowning 83 times in a single month in Thailand), but he was subjected to sensory and sleep deprivation, solitary confinement , loud noise and intense light. .

a summary of the united states senate report in the CIA torture program published in 2014 he referred to the “Violet Site”, although he hid the identity of the country in which the building was located.

The creation of the site caused tensions between different elements of the Bush administration, with the US ambassador to Lithuania complaining bitterly that the state department had been excluded from the planning process and kept in the dark.

The Senate report also noted that when the black site was opened, CIA personnel were suffering from “mission fatigue related to their interaction with the program,” a reference to the trauma agents experienced as a result of engaging in torture.

The detainees brought there had also already been subjected to so much “enhanced interrogation” (the CIA euphemism for torture) that many had been “virtually deprived of actionable intelligence.”

The CIA and Bush administration lawyers tried to justify Zubaydah’s torture on the grounds that he was a high-ranking Al Qaeda figure, but it emerged that he was not a member of the organization.

Other prisoners held at the site included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, who ruled that the government had violated European laws prohibiting the use of torture.

The site was closed in 2006 after Lithuania refused to admit a third prisoner, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, to the hospital. The three men remain in detention at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay.