Second-hand spy agency: Lithuania puts up for sale a former CIA secret facility
Authorities will offer for sale a large barn located on the outskirts of the capital and was one of the "black sites" where the U.S. investigated and tortured suspected terrorists outside its borders. The facility closed in 2006, and until recent years has been used for local intelligence training.
Reuters
25/01/2022
Tuesday, 25 January 2022, 14:16
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Former CIA secret facility on the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania, January 20, 2022 (Photo: Reuters)
A large barn on the outskirts of the Lithuanian capital, whose long corridor and windowless and soundproof rooms were formerly used by the CIA, will soon be put up for sale. The compound was part of Washington's "extradition program," in which terror suspects arrested on the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq were interrogated in secret prisons outside the jurisdiction of the United States. Very little is known about most of them to this day, more than a decade since the end of the controversial plan.
However, the European Court of Human Rights confirmed that the ten-room building, located in a snow-covered forest in the town of Antvili on the outskirts of Vilnius, was used by the CIA for investigations into terror suspects from 2005 to 2006. The facility was called "Project 2" or "Purple Detention Center" .
"It was a building under heavy security where you could do whatever you wanted. What exactly happened, we could not determine," said Arvides Anosaushks, who led the parliamentary inquiry into the matter, in an interview with Reuters in 2010.
Unlike a prison in the capital that was used by the KGB
during the Soviet era and has since become Lithuania's leading tourist site, the authorities have no intention of turning this facility into a museum.
The foundation has received the management of the facility from the Lithuanian intelligence services, who used it as a training facility from 2007 to 2018.
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Former CIA secret facility on the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania, January 20, 2022 (Photo: Reuters)
Former CIA secret facility on the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania, January 20, 2022 (Photo: Reuters)
According to testimony in European court, CIA inmates were held in solitary confinement at the facility, in constant light and with intense noise.
They were shaved upon arrival with their eyes or heads covered and their legs handcuffed.
The court ordered Lithuania to pay 100,000 euros in compensation to Abu Zubayeda, a senior al-Qaeda figure who according to the court was subject to human rights violations while imprisoned in this facility.
Other inmates at the site included Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, one of the planners of the 9/11 attacks.
The facility was closed in 2006 after Lithuania refused to hospitalize another well-known inmate, Mustafa al-Wassawi.
All three are currently being held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
In the incarceration facility, which has its own generator and water supply, the fluorescent lights and air conditioning noise control the rooms that have become empty.
"We do not press any button, so as not to turn on anything by mistake," said a representative of the government property fund, who asked not to be identified by name.
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