Al-Qaida Terrorists in Poland, Part 3: "I Am Not Accusing Poland, Just a Small Group of People"

When I hear Poland’s excuses, I feel like asking: “What sort of a state do you have? Is it normal to allow representatives of a foreign country to establish a prison on your own territory?” asks Joseph Margulies, the lawyer who is representing Abu Zubaydah — a Saudi man most probably detained and tortured in Poland — free of charge.

Everything We Were Afraid to Know

This was, and remains, one of the Third Republic’s most closely guarded secrets. For the past eight years, we have been uncovering it piece by piece, thanks to CIA operatives who have decided to tell American journalists about the torturing. A week ago, a U.S. military judge presiding in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (an al-Qaida member who was also imprisoned and tortured in Poland) demanded that the U.S. government present in court all its information concerning the secret prisons.

Three weeks ago, it also became known that the secret prisons were … useless. The testimony extracted by CIA agents using “enhanced techniques” was worthless. This was established by the American Senate committee which has investigated the CIA prisons.

The Polish authorities have been consistently silent. But we know one thing: For $15 million in cash, which the Intelligence Agency’s treasurer defrauded in any case, Poland got itself into a stinking mess.

This is the third and last part of a series that looks at the story from behind the scenes. In the first, we wrote about what happened at the airport in Szymany and the secret prison in Stare Kiejkuty, to which the CIA gave the cryptonym “Quartz,” and for which the Americans gave $15 million — 150 kilograms of money.

In the second, we wrote that the cash received “for the prisons” was defrauded, that the testimony extracted through torture was fairly worthless, and that the airport in Szymany went bankrupt.

* * *

“Give me a phone number where I can reach you.” I make an appointment to speak with Joseph Margulies, one of the American lawyers for Abu Zubaydah — allegedly terrorist No. 3 in al-Qaida.

The Americans are holding the Saudi man at the marine base in Guantanamo in Cuba. Everything indicates that at the turn of 2002 to 2003, Abu Zubaydah was a guest at “Quartz,” the CIA’s secret prison in Stare Kiejkuty. Margulies has filed a case on his behalf against Poland with the European Court of Human Rights.

He doesn’t want to give his phone number. “I am in Italy. Talking by means of my American cell phone will cost a fortune,” he says, as if he couldn’t buy himself an Italian card. He asks for my number and calls me on Skype. “This costs next to nothing,” he explains.

I ask him if he is afraid someone might listen in. (Chats through Skype are more difficult to intercept than a cell phone conversation.) Margulies ducks the question.

In a case like this one, any other American lawyer would make millions, but Margulies is defending Abu Zubaydah for free.

Joseph Margulies lectures at Northwestern University in Chicago and works at the MacArthur Justice Center, a law office specializing in human rights. He has written several books on the unlawful aspects of the war on terror. It is thanks to his complaint, which went to the U.S. Supreme Court, that prisoners at Guantanamo now have access to lawyers.

Joseph Margulies says that the tortures which Abu Zubaydah was subjected to while in Poland and elsewhere have led to permanent brain damage. His client suffers from excruciating headaches and buzzing noises that can bring him to the point of hysteria.

Bartosz T. Wieliński: When did you see Abu Zubaydah for the last time?

Joseph Margulies: I went to see him in Guantanamo last year, and my colleague — we represent him together — visited him a few weeks ago. A visit to the camp is quite an experience: The prison in Guantanamo is reminiscent of American high-security prisons, at least as far as procedures are concerned. The only difference is that the inmates in such prisons are convicts. Abu Zubaydah and the other Guantanamo prisoners are only terrorism suspects. Very often, such suspicions are based on very flimsy grounds.

Before entering, I was searched several times — I was made to go through metal detectors and my luggage was searched. There is not a square foot of floor space that isn’t observed by cameras. Abu Zubaydah’s cell is a wooden box. Inside there is a bunk and a sink.

Q: What did your meeting look like?

A: A table stood behind a wall of barbed wire. He sat on one side, I on the other.

Q: I imagine a policeman stood behind you and the conversation was recorded?

A: Absolutely not. I spoke to him as if I were in an American prison. I could extend my hand to him, show him documents. No one interfered in this. No one watched over our shoulders. I doubt that our conversations were recorded. That would be a serious violation of the right to defense.

Q: Abu Zubaydah has spent almost 15 years in various jails and was tortured. How is he now?

A: The word that describes him best is “damaged,” except that we are accustomed to use this word in reference to objects, not people. Abu Zubaydah’s face shows what he’s been through all these years. In the 1990s, during the Afghan civil war, he was wounded in the head by shrapnel and lost an eye. He was also seriously wounded during his arrest in Pakistan. He was shot in the abdomen and barely survived. Later on, CIA agents waterboarded him 83 times. All this has left traces on him that are easy to see. When I first entered his cell, I saw a suffering man.

Q: You spoke through a translator?

A: No. Abu Zubaydah speaks English quite well. He has a higher education and is very intelligent and well-read. He is certainly not a black-and-white figure. People imagine him as a bearded Muslim who burns with hatred and a desire to kill. But Abu Zubaydah is neither a fanatic nor a savage. If he had been born in the U.S., he might have been a physician or a high-class engineer.

Q: What did Abu Zubaydah tell you? Was he sorry for himself?

A: What we spoke about I am not at liberty to tell you. I am bound by lawyer confidentiality. I can only say that I tried to animate his mind. Not much has taken place in his case lately, so we had no pressing matters to discuss. Abu Zubaydah not only suffers on account of past wounds; having spent so many years in prison, without contact with the outside world, he is becoming increasingly stupefied. This sense of falling into the abyss is horribly painful. I simply feel sorry for him.

Q: You feel sorry for a terrorist — bin Laden’s right-hand man, a person who took part in the preparations for the World Trade Center attack?

A: You hold the view, as do many people in the world, that Abu Zubaydah is exactly the kind of man the CIA took him to be in 2002. And that irrespective of how brutally he was treated, there’s no reason to feel sorry for him because he deserved it. After all, he was a terrorist. That’s a horrible way of thinking.

Today, the U.S. authorities no longer consider him to be a major al-Qaida terrorist. They no longer even claim he was a member of this organization. An error has been committed. Abu Zubaydah was mistaken for someone else. That’s why he was waterboarded for so long. Abu Zubaydah did not say what was expected of a captured terrorist leader. He didn’t because he didn’t know what it was all about.

Q: Do you think that after such a terrible attack the Americans should continue to go easy on their opponents?

A: After 9/11, a myth was created in the U.S. — that there was no other way. That it was necessary to humiliate, beat and waterboard captured prisoners to prevent further attacks. What’s more, the authorities behaved as if no al-Qaida terrorists — not to mention members of other organizations — had ever been interrogated in the U.S., as if interrogation manuals had to be re-written from scratch. One and the other are nonsense.

What’s more, it turns out that torture, which is unacceptable from a legal and moral standpoint, hasn’t extracted any significant information from the prisoners. The interrogations should not have been conducted by the CIA, but by the FBI. The latter is an experienced organization that knows terrorism from the inside. FBI agents know foreign languages, they know the people they interrogate and their traditions, and they know a lot about their organizations. The CIA people had no idea who they were facing across the table. They were amateurs. What’s worse, when they were unable to squeeze information from their prisoners, they sent them to countries where medieval torture methods were used.

Q: Did Abu Zubaydah say anything about Poland?

A: On many occasions he has stressed that he would like the persons responsible for the treatment he received, including those in Poland, to be brought to justice — for us to prosecute them.

Q: Do you think he knew he was brought to Poland in 2002?

A: I don’t think so. The prisons were secret, and the manner in which prisoners were transferred was organized so they wouldn’t know where they were. But Poland was not a blank spot for Abu Zubaydah. He’s an educated man. He knew Poland and its history from readings.

Q: But there is no unequivocal evidence that he was a prisoner at Stare Kiejkuty.

A: What do you mean, there isn’t? The American government has officially admitted the prisons existed and that prisoners were tortured in them. It hasn’t disclosed where, but we have data about the landings of the CIA planes which carried the prisoners. We know that Abu Zubaydah arrived in Szymany from the secret prison in Thailand, and we know when he left that prison. We know the entire itinerary of those flights. We know what the prison in Stare Kiejkuty looked like. We know what the cell in which he was kept looked like. We know who came into contact with him.

There is no doubt that a CIA prison operated in Poland. The Polish prosecutors who are investigating this matter know this as well. The politicians who deny the existence of the prisons are making a mockery of the law. It’s as if they denied there had ever been communism in Poland.

Q: Just because a CIA plane landed in Szymany doesn’t mean there were prisoners on board. It could have been bringing agents to a meeting with their Polish colleagues.

A: And for the needs of such meetings one of the villas was transformed into a prison? The agents were expected to sleep in cells? Let’s be serious … We would have more evidence, such as recordings from the interrogations showing that Abu Zubaydah vomited during waterboarding, if the CIA hadn’t decided — illegally — to destroy those recordings.

Q: Polish politicians unofficially say that after 9/11 it was not possible to say “No” to the Americans, particularly as we had been admitted to NATO.

A: This is an entirely different issue. Why won’t the Polish government simply admit that it had no choice, or that the Americans forced you to do it? This would place Warsaw in an entirely different light. But personally, I believe that even this justification is morally indefensible. The Polish government should have said “No.” It was perfectly clear why the Americans wanted the villa.

Q: Politicians in Warsaw say that they could not have known with certainty what the CIA would be doing in Stare Kiejkuty.

A: Not much effort was needed to figure out what would be happening there. Politicians and intelligence personnel knew that this facility would be secret; that the Americans would not let Poles inside; that the people detained there would not be protected by the Geneva Convention and other regulations. At the time, the first information about aggressive interrogation methods had already seen the light of day. Warning lights should have gone off in Warsaw.

When I hear Poland’s excuses, I feel like asking: “What sort of a state do you have? Is it the 51st state of the U.S.? Is it normal to allow representatives of a foreign country to establish a prison on your territory and not care what goes on there?”

Q: Why do you insist on suing Poland and not the U.S.? Because it’s a weaker player?

A: I am not accusing Poland, just a small group of people who collaborated with the CIA. At the same time, I demand that those responsible in Romania and Lithuania — where there were also such prisons — be held to account as well. Those responsible for the secret prisons and for torture, including Americans, should be punished wherever they are. They have all committed the same unforgivable error: They accepted a priori that the men being carted back and forth by the CIA were terrorists and wrongdoers. They also decided that in the post-9/11 world, law had ceased to matter. They now have to face the consequences. I believe that the European Court of Human Rights will condemn Poland for the lies of its politicians and will instruct it to speed up the investigation in this matter.

Q: And what if the Polish Prosecutor’s Office decides to file the case?

A: Then we’ll resort to the International Criminal Court. If Poland doesn’t want to prosecute the accomplices of the CIA in Warsaw, they will face trial at The Hague.