CIA Torture "Black Site" for Alleged Terrorists found in Lithuania

[Magda Hassan]

EXCLUSIVE: CIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy


ABC News Finds the Location of a "Black Site" for Alleged Terrorists in Lithuania


By BRIAN ROSS and MATTHEW COLE
Nov. 18, 2009
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The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.
This former Lithuanian horse stable was converted into a secret CIA detention center, according to a...
This former Lithuanian horse stable was converted into a secret CIA detention center, according to a former U.S. intelligence official and a current Lithuanian government official. Some al Qaeda detainees were held at this facility, the officials said.
(ABC)

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time. A full report on the can be seen on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson tonight.
"The activities in that prison were illegal," said human rights researcher John Sifton. "They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions."
Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the "black site" in 2004.
Related
EXCLUSIVE: Sources Tell ABC News Top Al Qaeda Figures Held in Secret CIA Prisons

Lithuanian President Announces Investigation into CIA Secret Prison

More from Brian Ross and the Investigative Team


Lithuania agreed to allow the CIA prison after President George W. Bush visited the country in 2002 and pledged support for Lithuania's efforts to join NATO.
"The new members of NATO were so grateful for the U.S. role in getting them into that organization that they would do anything the U.S. asked for during that period," said former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant. "They were eager to please and eager to be cooperative on security and on intelligence matters."

Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite declined ABC's request for an interview.
ABC News first reported that Lithuania was one of three eastern European countries, along with Poland and Romania, where the CIA secretly interrogated suspected high-value al-Qaeda terrorists, but until now the precise site had not been confirmed. Read that report here.
Until March 2004, the site was a riding academy and café owned by a local family. The facility is in the town of Antivilai, in the forest 20 kilometers northeast of the city center of Vilnius, near an exclusive suburb where many government officials live.

A "Building Within A Building"

In March 2004, the family sold the property to Elite, LLC, a now-defunct company registered in Delaware and Panama and Washington, D.C. That same month, Lithuania marked its formal admission to NATO.
The CIA constructed the prison over the next several months, apparently flying in prefabricated elements from outside Lithuania. The prison opened in Sept. 2004.
Related
Officials: Lithuania Hosted Secret CIA Prison To Get "Our Ear"

CIA's Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described

Secret List of U.S. Military Bases to Replace Guantanamo


According to sources that saw the facility, the riding academy originally consisted of an indoor riding area with a red metallic roof, a stable and a cafe. The CIA built a thick concrete wall inside the riding area. Behind the wall, it built what one Lithuanian source called a "building within a building."
On a series of thick concrete pads, it installed what a source called "prefabricated pods" to house prisoners, each separated from the other by five or six feet. Each pod included a shower, a bed and a toilet. Separate cells were constructed for interrogations. The CIA converted much of the rest of the building into garage space.

Intelligence officers working at the prison were housed next door in the converted stable, raising the roof to add space. Electrical power for both structures was provided by a 2003 Caterpillar autonomous generator. All the electrical outlets in the renovated structure were 110 volts, meaning they were designed for American appliances. European outlets and appliances typically use 220 volts.
The prison pods inside the barn were not visible to locals. They describe seeing large amounts of earth being excavated during the summer of 2004. Locals who saw the activity at the prison and approached to ask for work were turned away by English-speaking guards. The guards were replaced by new guards every 90 days.
Former CIA officials directly involved or briefed on the highly classified secret prison program tell ABC News that as many as eight suspects were held for more than a year in the Vilnius prison. Flight logs viewed by ABC News confirm that CIA planes made repeated flights into Lithuania during that period. In November 2005, after public disclosures about the program, the prison was closed, as was another "black site" in Romania.

Lithuanian Prison One of Many Around Europe, Officials Said

The CIA moved the so-called High Value Detainees (HVD) out of Europe to "war zone" facilities, according to one of the former CIA officials, meaning they were moved to the Middle East. Within nine months, President Bush announced the existence of the program and ordered the transfer of 14 of the detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, Ramzi bin al Shihb and Abu Zubaydah, to Guantanamo.
Related
Psychologists Told CIA Waterboarding Was Safe

You're Fired! CIA Axes $1000-A-Day Waterboarding Experts

Deaths, Missing Detainees Still Blacked Out in New CIA Report


In August 2009, after ABC News reported the existence of the secret prison outside Vilnius, Lithuanian president Grybauskaite called for an investigation. "If this is true," Grybauskaite said, "Lithuania has to clean up, accept responsibility, apologize, and promise it will never happen again."
At the time, a Lithuanian government official denied that his country had hosted a secret CIA facility. The CIA told ABC News that reporting the existence of the Lithuanian prison was "irresponsible" and declined to discuss the location of the prison.
On Tuesday, the CIA again declined to talk about the prison. "The CIA's terrorist interrogation program is over," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. "This agency does not discuss publicly where detention facilities may or may not have been."

Former CIA officials told ABC News that the prison in Lithuania was one of eight facilities the CIA set-up after 9/11 to detain and interrogate top al-Qaeda operatives captured around the world. Thailand, Romania, Poland, Morocco, and Afghanistan have also been identified as countries that housed secret prisons for the CIA. President Barack Obama ordered all the sites closed shortly after taking office in January.
The Lithuanian prison was the last "black" site opened in Europe, after the CIA's secret prison in Poland was closed down in late 2003 or early 2004.
"It obviously took a lot of effort to keep [the prison] secret," said John Sifton, whose firm One World Research investigates human rights abuses. "There's a reason this stuff gets kept secret."
"It's an embarrassment, and a crime."

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cia-secret...978&page=3

[Magda Hassan]

Blame the messenger. What a cop out by the government official. The building is now used by the Lithuanian intelligence service.

Lithuania: ABC News Report 'Not Helping' Our Image


ABC News Finds Secret "Torture" Prison for al-Qaeda Detainees at Swank Riding Academy


By MATTHEW COLE and BRIAN ROSS
Nov. 19, 2009
[URL="http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cia-secret-prison-exposed/comments?type=story&id=9126015"]
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A top Lithuanian official said that a report by ABC News that it had discovered a secret CIA prison in a former riding academy near Vilnius was damaging to his country's reputation.

Share
Outside Lithuania the CIA used a former barn to interrogate al Qaeda members.


"Obviously, this is not helping Lithuania's image," Foreign Minister Vygaudas Usackas told the Baltic News Service Thursday. "Therefore it is vital that we conduct an investigation and clear any doubts." Usackas also warned Lithuanians not to believe "rumors or wild tales."
On Wednesday, ABC News revealed the location of one of the CIA's secret "black site" prisons, where harsh interrogation techniques were allegedly used on accused al-Qaeda terrorists, in a converted horseback riding facility 20 kilometers northeast of the Lithuanian capital. Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at an attached café, the CIA installed a hidden concrete structure where it could hold up to eight "high value detainees" at a time, a current Lithuanian government official and a former CIA official told ABC News.
Related
WATCH: 'Elite' Club Conceals CIA 'Torture' Cells

EXCLUSIVE: CIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy

More from Brian Ross and the Investigative Team


For many of the residents of this former Soviet state, it is reminiscent of the KGB's secret prisons. "As a Lithuanian," a local woman told ABC News, "I am not very proud of this."

The activities in that prison were illegal," said John Sifton, a New York attorney whose firm One World Research investigates human rights abuses. "They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions."
It is not known which suspected al-Qaeda figures were in Lithuania, but 9/11 Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was moved out of the CIA's secret prison in Poland just before the Lithuanian facility was opened. According to sources who say they saw the facility, the riding academy originally consisted of an indoor riding area with a red metallic roof, a stable and a cafe. The CIA built a thick concrete wall inside the riding area. Behind the wall, it built what one Lithuanian source called a "building within a building."

Inside the Secret Prison

On a series of thick concrete pads, it installed what a source called "prefabricated pods" to house prisoners, each separated from the other by five or six feet. Each pod included a shower, a bed and a toilet. Separate cells were constructed for interrogations. The CIA converted much of the rest of the building into garage space. Intelligence officers working at the prison were housed next door in the converted stable.
A local woman who lives near the complex, and who refused to give her name for fear of retribution reports that when she often saw cars with black-tinted windows drive up to the buildings. When a garage door opened, all the lights in the complex would go off until the car had entered the building and the door had closed.
Related
EXCLUSIVE: CIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found

EXCLUSIVE: Sources Tell ABC News Top Al Qaeda Figures Held in Secret CIA Prisons

Lithuanian President Announces Investigation into CIA Secret Prison


Electrical power for both structures was provided by a 2003 Caterpillar autonomous generator. All the electrical outlets in the renovated structure were 110 volts, meaning they were designed for American appliances. European outlets and appliances typically use 220 volts.

Locals report that English-speaking guards worked at the complex, and often swam in a nearby lake. The guards were rotated every 90 days. Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the "black site" in 2004. ABC News first reported that Lithuania was one of three eastern European countries, along with Poland and Romania, where the CIA secretly interrogated suspected high-value al-Qaeda terrorists, but until now the precise site had not been confirmed. Read that report here. The CIA purchased the property in March 2004, the same month Lithuania marked its formal admission to NATO. Poland joined NATO in 1999, and Romania joined in 2004.
"The older members, the original 15 members of NATO, would never have said yes to something like this," said former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant. "But the new members were easy to please."

CIA Declines Comment

The CIA opened the prison in September 2004, and closed it in November 2005, former CIA officials told CIA News.
Related
Officials: Lithuania Hosted Secret CIA Prison To Get "Our Ear"

CIA's Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described

Secret List of U.S. Military Bases to Replace Guantanamo


The CIA declined to talk about the prison. "The CIA's terrorist interrogation program is over," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. "This agency does not discuss publicly where detention facilities may or may not have been." The building is now owned by Lithuanian intelligence, which refused to let ABC News past its gates.

[Magda Hassan]

From the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...9111904615

Residents of this village were mystified five years ago when tight-lipped American construction workers suddenly appeared at a mothballed riding stable here and built a large, two-story building without windows, ringed by a metal fence and security cameras.

Today, a Lithuanian parliamentary committee is investigating whether the CIA operated a secret prison for terrorism suspects on the plot of land at the edge of a thick forest for more than a year, from 2004 until late 2005.

Lithuanian land registry documents reviewed by The Washington Post show the property was bought in March 2004 by Elite LLC, an unincorporated U.S. firm registered in the District.

Records in Lithuania and Washington do not reveal the names of individual officers for Elite but identify its sole shareholder as Star Finance Group and Holdings Inc., a Panamanian corporation. There is no record of Elite owning other property in Lithuania.

The company, which has since had its registration revoked by D.C. authorities, in turn sold the property to the Lithuanian government in 2007, two years after the existence of the CIA's overseas network of secret prisons known as black sites -- including some in Eastern Europe -- was first revealed by The Washington Post.

Domas Grigaliunas, a former counterintelligence officer with the Lithuanian military, said it was widely known among the Lithuanian secret services that U.S. intelligence partners had built the site, although its original purpose was kept highly classified.
"It just popped up out of nowhere," he said in an interview. "Everybody knew this was handed to us by the Americans."
Grigaliunas said he was asked in 2004 by the deputy director of Lithuanian military intelligence to develop plans to help a "foreign partner" that was interested in bringing individuals to Lithuania and concealing their whereabouts as part of a covert operation.
He said he made some recommendations but was never told the identity of the foreign partner or whether the operation was carried out. Since then, however, he said he has become convinced that the program involved the CIA's detention centers for terrorism suspects.

Lithuanian officials have also been pressed to investigate by the Council of Europe, an official human rights watchdog, which has conducted its own probe of CIA operations on the continent. Council officials said they had received confidential records confirming that CIA-chartered planes had flown from Afghanistan to Vilnius in 2004 and 2005.

Thomas Hammarberg, the council's commissioner for human rights, said in a telephone interview that flight logs had been doctored to indicate that the planes had touched down in neighboring countries, including Finland and Poland.

[Helen Reyes]

I know a little too much about Lithuanian politics. Formin Usackas is former ambassador to the US. Dalia Grybauskaite was basicaly appointed president after serving as a European Commissioner by virtue of her Soviet economic education. She was appointed there because of her network of Communist Party friends in Lithuania, again, selected. Both Usackas and Grybauskaite are patently interested in whitewashing the issue. Grybauskaite isn't even seeking legal accountability, according to the quote by ABC.

She replaced Adamkus, the American former military intelligence agent and Nixon appointee to EPA who returned to the presidency on a colored revolution in 2003 to oust Rolandas Paksas. Before going to the USA after WWII, Adamkus served as head of a Catholic Youth organization for DPs in Germany. Before that, he served under Nazi command fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of the Third Reich against the Red Army in Lithuania, having returned from his family's residence in Nazi Germany to western Lithuania in late 1944.

Lithuania went along with the diktat from Washington in 2001 just as the provisional government greeted Lithuania's "liberation" by Adolf Hitler in 1941. It wasn't a quid pro quo for NATO membership, Lithuania would willingly have created as many torture chambers as Wshington asked for with or without NATO membership. And just as Lithuanians still haven't come to terms with the almost total destruction of Lithuanian Jews at their own hands during WWII, they won't face up to this latest complicity in war crimes, atrocities and human rights violations. Torture and murder of civilians.

I'm looking at a news item from Lithuania from 3 days ago right now that says the director of the Lithuanian Genocide Center (dedicated to promoting the idea Lithuanians not Jews were the main victims of genocide in Lithuania but funded from the state budget) where she decries webpages in Israel listing esteemed Lithuanian patriots and partisans as war criminals and Holocaust perpetrators. She says the main direction of activities of her center over the next year will be debunking such claims, with the implication that people who don't go along with the center's research and persist in accusing Lithuanian partisans of killing Jews will be brought to legal account. Does it sound fantastic? Well, there's legislation in the Lithuanian parliament to make it illegal to deny the LITHUANIAN holocaust, as well as the Jewish one. You almost get the impression the legislators really wished they could have made the print a lot smaller for the Jewish side of their equation, so people wouldn't pay much attention to it. That's the point, to obfuscate the Holocaust in Lithuania by entangling it with the idea of equal suffering by Lithuanians. And this is exactly what they did in the so-called Genocide Museum the Center runs, they mention Jews about once, in small print, in a little corner somewhere, literally in parentheses. According to the newspaper, she made these remarks to the Lithuanian parliament during the Center's annual report for continued funding, not off-the-cuff remarks to journalists. (the article is called "Lietuvius smeiziancius zydus zadama uzciaupti" or Promises to Shut Up Jews Slandering Lithuanians, at http://www.vakarozinios.lt on November 18, 2009, page 3).

This is the clearest case I have ever heard of, of the truth in the saying that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

[Helen Reyes]

...I posted that to infowars with some changes.

a black car came and shone its lights in my front windows for a long time, then sat there idling outside my window for hours, two guys in a sports car in the middle of nowhere late at night...scary. I took some snapshots and they raced off. well, if I'm not around much in the future....

[Magda Hassan]

...I posted that to infowars with some changes.

a black car came and shone its lights in my front windows for a long time, then sat there idling outside my window for hours, two guys in a sports car in the middle of nowhere late at night...scary. I took some snapshots and they raced off. well, if I'm not around much in the future....

Helen, you should upload the pictures here (and anywhere else for that matter) We like to see their faces and their number plates :afraid:

[Ed Jewett]

Torture

Who Will Investigate CIA/RAND/APA Torture ‘Workshop’?

By Jeffrey Kaye
The Public Record
Nov 21st, 2009


Photo: Andres Rueda/flickr

Back in May 2007, while researching the activities of the American Psychological Association (APA) in support of the U.S. government’s interrogation program, I came across evidence that the APA had engaged in a discussion of torture techniques during a workshop organized by APA and the RAND Corporation, “with generous funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).”
The workshop was held at the Arlington, Virginia, headquarters of the privately-held but long linked-to-the-government RAND think tank. APA Director of Science Geoff Mumford acted as liaison to the CIA for the meeting. Susan Brandon, a key APA “Senior Scientist”, and former member of the Bush White House’s Office of Science & Technology Policy, helped organize the affair, along with psychologist Kirk Hubbard, who was then Chief of the Research & Analysis Branch, Operational Assessment Division of the CIA.
The workshop was titled the “Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory”, and it discussed new ways to utilize drugs and sensory bombardment techniques to break down interrogatees. Those are signal techniques of psychological torture long utilized by the CIA and other intelligence agencies and military around the world.
According to the brief APA account:

Meeting at RAND headquarters in Arlington, VA, the workshop drew together approximately 40 individuals including research psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists who study various aspects of deception and representatives from the CIA, FBI and Department of Defense with interests in intelligence operations. In addition, representatives from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Science and Technology Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security were present…. Following brief introductions and welcoming remarks… workshop participants divided into break-out groups to discuss thematic scenarios….

It was one of the particular “break-out groups” that concerned me. According to APA’s Public Policy Office, which publishes an online newspaper called (with perhaps an unconscious taste for irony) “Spin,” the workshops covered Embassy “Walk-in” informants, Law Enforcement Threat Assessment, and Intelligence gathering (”What are the dimensions of truth?”). But the workshop on Law Enforcement Interrogation and Debriefing had some shocking language (emphasis added, quoted material from APA Government Relations: Science Policy website):

Law enforcement routinely question witnesses and suspects regarding criminal activity. How do you tell if the individual is telling the truth, lying, or something in between? Acts of omission and acts of commission are both important to identify.
How do we find out if the informant has knowledge of which s/he is not aware? How important are differential power and status between witness and officer?
What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?
What are mechanisms and processes of learning to lie? Can these be demonstrated within relatively short periods of time (e.g., within a polygraph test session)?….
What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?

According to writer, Katherine Eban, who wrote about the APA/RAND/CIA workshop in an August 2007 article at Vanity Fair, SERE-cum-CIA psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell were attendees at the workshop. Eban elaborated in a July 30, 2007 interview with Amy Goodman:

KATHERINE EBAN: …The attendance list is divided into two parts. One was really academic researchers, and the other one was operational, operational psychologists. So these were a lot of people who were associated with the CIA, some whose identity was so classified that they were only listed by first name in italics. Mitchell and Jessen were there on the list, listed as CIA contractors. And I think without that attendance list, I don’t know if we would have been able to put out this article.
AMY GOODMAN: The CIA funded this APA-RAND conference?
KATHERINE EBAN: Correct. And one of the main CIA participants and organizers, a man named Kirk Hubbard, told a key participant before the meeting, “Don’t ask these psychologists what they do for a living. Don’t ask them to identify themselves, because basically their identity is secret and classified.”
AMY GOODMAN: They debated the effectiveness of truth serum and other coercive techniques.
KATHERINE EBAN: Right. That’s correct.

“Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of”
So, one participant is told not to even reveal names of who attended this CIA/APA/RAND affair. At least one APA member has written to Geoff Mumford and Stephen Behnke (the latter is Director of the APA’s Ethics Office) asking for more information on the content of the meeting. To date, they have not bothered to respond.
The secrecy is not surprising, nor even relatively new. The APA and CIA have a very long history of working together on interrogation techniques, in particular on sensory deprivation and use of drugs like LSD and mescaline in interrogations, and other methods of breaking down the mind and the body of prisoners.
Use of drugs to influence interrogations, in addition to sensory deprivation, distortion and overload or bombardment were signal techniques in a decades-long interrogation research program that came to be known by its most famous moniker, MKULTRA (although these torture techniques were studied and tested by the CIA even earlier, in its 1950s projects Bluebird and Artichoke). Such techniques were codified by the early 1960s in a CIA Counterinsurgency Interrogation Manual, also known by its codename, KUBARK.
According to numerous researchers, the CIA, and the psychologists and psychiatrists they contracted to work with them, including many of the top behavioral scientists of their day, experimented with many drugs in their quest to find a “truth” drug that would open up the recalcitrant and expose the liar and the dissembler. The CIA has declassified a paper from its in-house intelligence journal from the early 1960s, “‘Truth’ Drugs in Interrogation,” where they discuss research on drugs for interrogation ranging from scopolamine, amphetamines, and barbiturates to cannabis, LSD, and mescaline. The CIA authors discuss the limitations of using drugs, based on research, and conclude that a special use for drugs may be found in detection of deception.
(A discussion of CIA research into truth drugs, use of LSD, and other topics is thoroughly discussed in H.P. Albarelli’s recently published book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments.)
But the quotes from the CIA/RAND/APA deception workshop are not from 40 years ago. They are from 2003. Evidently the research into using drugs on captured or arrested or incarcerated prisoners or “enemy combatants” has not ended.
In an article last June, I noted that the current Army Field Manual carries an allowance for use of drugs on certain prisoners which is less restrictive than even John Yoo allowed for in the Bybee memos. For months, the the Pentagon Inspector General has been investigating the use of drugs upon prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, but we have not heard where that investigation is headed, nor when it will be concluded. An email request for more information was not returned.
It is infuriating that the planning and implementation of torture, such as that which took place under almost public purview–i.e., it was practically bragged about by the APA on its own website–does not lead to a full set of investigations. Psychologists within APA who attempted to bring the issue up were unable to get any answers.
On November 9, members of Psychologists for an Ethical APA jettisoned its attempts to (for the most part) reform the APA from within, stating on their website that they have “initiated a movement to coordinate a mass resignation from the American Psychological Association (APA) on the part of APA members who are concerned about APA’s actions and policies regarding psychologists’ participation in interrogations and detention in extra-legal War on Terror prisons, as well as about APA’s unresponsiveness to widespread member efforts to change these policies.” They set up a petition site to record member’s resignation statements, as well. Who can blame them, at this point? (For the record, I resigned from APA in January 2008, citing the APA/CIA/RAND workshop as one reason for leaving.)
Something very rotten is going on at the heart of American behavioral science, and I’m not talking about decades-old scandals — I’m talking about right now. Along with collaboration with the CIA and military on possible new abusive interrogation methods, the APA is fighting to keep its links with the military, and to keep psychologists as essential components of their interrogation practice. This is the program behind the Intelligence Science Board’s Educing Information (large PDF) report, which was accepted recently by the Obama administration as their new template for interrogation practice. In a future article, I’ll discuss how this report was set up by the CIA and military as a snow job to mask the use of pernicious interrogation methods that include techniques of psychological torture.
In the meantime, won’t someone with political clout open up an investigation of the CIA/RAND/APA meeting that plotted torture?
This report was originally published on FireDogLake.com.
Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor The Public Record, has been blogging at Daily Kos since May 2005, and maintains a personal blog, Invictus. E-mail Mr. Kaye at sfpsych at gmail dot com.

[David Guyatt]

Records in Lithuania and Washington do not reveal the names of individual officers for Elite but identify its sole shareholder as Star Finance Group and Holdings Inc., a Panamanian corporation. There is no record of Elite owning other property in Lithuania.

"Star" or "Stars" incorporated into a front company name seems to be one of those name favoured by the CIA and US intelligence community and is always worth looking out for.

Several years ago now I was sent quite a lot of material on Alliance Stars USA Inc., and Crescent which had an awful lot of big names on its board -- former CIA DCI James Woolsey, General James Abrahamson, Prince Alfred of LIechenstein and so on. Lots of covert stuff, shady financial dealings and scams and intelligence connections to Greece, Jordan and elsewhere in the middle east. Back then, circa 2004/5 they had their own website but that soon disappeared.

Google the names and you'll still find bits and pieces remaining although it looks to me as though it has been quite well cleaned up now.

[Helen Reyes]

Helen, you should upload the pictures here (and anywhere else for that matter) We like to see their faces and their number plates :afraid:

Thanks MAgda, will do, if it happens again. Maybe it was just extremely conspicious drug dealers, you never know

[Magda Hassan]

Lithuania 'hosted at least two secret CIA prisons'
Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:04:24 GMT

This Thursday, November 19, 2009 picture shows a former riding school outside the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, which allegedly housed a CIA prison.


A Lithuanian inquiry has found that the US Central Intelligence Agency set up and used secret prisons on its soil following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US.

Lithuania's intelligence agency assisted the CIA-run secret prisons, which were used to hold at least eight al-Qaeda suspects, the parliamentary panel in charge of the probe said in a report on Tuesday.

The National Security Committee report records instances in 2005 and 2006 when chartered planes were allowed to land in Lithuania, adding that all the Lithuanian officials, including President Dalia Grybauskaite, were kept in the dark about the aircraft's passengers.

The report, which is based on testimony of top politicians and intelligence officials, also sought to close the door on any charges of human rights violations on the grounds that no official was ever aware of exactly what was happening in the US-run prisons.

It said Lithuania's State Security Department provided two facilities to the CIA.

A single detention cell was set up to house one suspect in 2002 and a former riding school on the outskirts of the capital Vilnius was turned into a larger facility in 2004, big enough to hold eight suspects.

Since August 2009, the US media reports have accused Lithuania, Poland and Romania, of hosting to secret CIA interrogation centers, reigniting concerns over the exact number of these facilities and the extent to which the spy agency used its questionable tactics.

They have contributed to straining Washington's relations with some of its key allies during former president George W. Bush's administration.

One such former ally, Britain, is now under increasing pressure to investigate whether its own agents were involved in the alleged CIA torture of the British citizens in Pakistan.

Lithuania's spy chief, Povilas Malakauskas, resigned last week as controversy mounted over the secret jails. A lawmaker said the resignation was "partly" because of the government's efforts to investigate the details surrounding the CIA facility.

According to the conclusions of a 2007 probe conducted on behalf of the Council of Europe, 14 European governments are accused of having permitted the CIA to run detention centers on their soil or to carry out rendition flights between 2002 and 2005.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=114...=351020605