A C.I.A. Black Web site Stays a Sensitive Topic for Lithuania

First got here containers loaded with gear for a secluded property underneath renovation on the sting of the forest. It had housed a horseback driving academy and a restaurant, however was being reconfigured for a mysterious enterprise.

Then muscular younger males appeared, jogging by the bushes at unusual hours and talking to 1 one other in English.

Juozas Banevicius, who watched the comings and goings within the tiny settlement of Antaviliai, Lithuania, almost 20 years in the past, recalled considering it a bit odd that the newcomers would shoo away anybody who got here near the safety fence that they had put up round their property, which was beforehand open to the general public.

“Nobody knew what they were doing inside,” recalled Mr. Banevicius, 66.

The reply has been subjected to intense information media and judicial scrutiny within the years since. It has all pointed to the identical conclusion: The village of Antaviliai was dwelling to a secret C.I.A. detention and torture heart, one among three so-called black websites that the company arrange in Jap Europe after the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults.

In January, the European Court docket of Human Rights dominated {that a} secret jail code-named Web site Violet had “beyond reasonable doubt” been situated in Lithuania. It didn’t title Antaviliai, which is close to the capital, Vilnius, however the village is the one place within the nation that Lithuanian officers have acknowledged as a website of a former C.I.A. facility — though they insist it was not a jail.

Web site Violet featured in a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014 after an investigation on the C.I.A.’s use of waterboarding and different “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In accordance with the report, the positioning operated from February 2005 till October 2006, when it closed due to unspecified “medical issues.”

The courtroom ruling in January concluded that Lithuania had violated the European Conference on Human Rights “because of its complicity in the C.I.A. secret detainee program.”

Poland, which initially denied internet hosting a secret American jail often called Web site Blue, acknowledged after the Senate investigation that it had let the C.I.A. maintain terrorism suspects on its territory. The Polish president on the time, Aleksander Kwasniewski, insisted he was unaware of the tough methods utilized by American interrogators.

Against this, a number of courtroom circumstances and investigations have solely bolstered in Lithuania a carapace of official secrecy — and shows of loyalty to america by a susceptible Baltic nation petrified of an more and more aggressive Russia.

Lithuania’s well-documented complicity in C.I.A. torture, mentioned Kestutis Girnius, a historian at Vilnius College, “is not something anyone here wants to talk about. They buried the whole issue at the start and have continued to bury it.”

A giant motive for that, he mentioned, was the dependence of his nation, a NATO member sandwiched between Belarus and the closely militarized Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on america for its safety. However, he requested: “Do we really have to be so obsequious? When America says jump, we only ask, ‘How high?’”

Additionally exasperated is Egidijus Kuris, a Lithuanian choose on the European Court docket of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France. “The evidence that there was a prison is obvious. The evidence that there were people there is obvious. There’s no pretending here that it wasn’t,” he mentioned after a ruling in opposition to his nation in 2018. “And yet we still ask, ‘Do you think there was a prison?’”

A part of the reason for this, he urged, was that no one in energy needed to dig into what occurred to a portion of the thousands and thousands of {dollars} supplied by the C.I.A. to finance a secret jail in Lithuania that the nation’s Parliament discovered was not correctly accounted for. “Whoever pocketed the money in Lithuania must be identified,” Mr. Kuris mentioned.

In 2009, when ABC News identified Antaviliai as a former C.I.A. black website, the Lithuanian Parliament shaped a committee to analyze. It concluded that the nation’s State Safety Division, or V.S.D., had obtained cash for unspecified “joint actions” and that its accounting had been “inappropriate.”

V.S.D. denied this, saying that it had “strictly” accounted for all funds and that “there were no millions leaked anywhere.”

The parliamentary investigation didn’t attain a conclusion on whether or not the key jail had existed. Whereas flight knowledge and different circumstantial proof indicated that detainees might have been introduced into Lithuania secretly, it discovered, whether or not this had occurred couldn’t be decided.

The closest Lithuania has come to acknowledging that the C.I.A. ran a detention heart on its territory was in 2009, when President Dalia Grybauskaite, who took workplace three years after the Individuals had left, mentioned she had “indirect suspicions” of a secret jail.

If these suspicions had been true, she mentioned, “Lithuania must cleanse itself, take responsibility and apologize.” It was additionally time, she added, for america “to give answers.”

Her feedback dismayed the U.S. Embassy in Lithuania, which had been working efficiently for years to maintain the problem out of the general public eye. It wrote in a cable that was later posted online by WikiLeaks that the president had “inexplicably given new life to an unsubstantiated story, reflecting a lack of political seasoning.”

“Rather than help quiet a story that does not reflect favorably on Lithuania, her comments instead have suggested that there may be a kernel of truth to the allegations,” the cable mentioned.

Since then, officers have stayed silent. Speaking about Web site Violet would elevate questions concerning the lacking cash and provides materials for propaganda to Russia, which delights in stating American sins whereas flaunting its personal use of torture, because it did final month with the discharge of video footage showing the brutal treatment of suspects detained in reference to the terrorist assault close to Moscow final month.

In its ruling in January, the European Court docket in Strasbourg ordered Lithuania to pay 100,000 euros, or about $108,000, to a Saudi citizen who judges decided had been held within the Baltic nation. Lithuania’s Justice Ministry mentioned final week that it could adjust to the order, saying it was obliged to take action “regardless of whether it agrees or disagrees with the court’s reasoning.”

The European Court docket notified Lithuania in March that it had accepted a third case relating to Site Violet. This was introduced by a suspected Qaeda terrorist, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who’s now detained within the U.S. navy jail in Guantánamo Bay and claims he was held and tortured for 5 months by the C.I.A. in Lithuania. He received earlier circumstances in opposition to Poland and Romania for unlawful detention in these international locations.

The Justice Ministry mentioned it deliberate to problem the brand new claims and argue, because it has beforehand with out success, “that all the evidence regarding the applicant’s detention in Lithuania is indirect and that the standards of proof should be different.”

Web site Violet in Lithuania was shut down in late 2006 after native safety officers, cautious of attracting consideration, refused to confess to a hospital a C.I.A. detainee, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who wanted remedy for a medical emergency, based on the Senate report.

After the C.I.A. left, the property — free of probably prying neighbors aside from Mr. Banevicius and residents of a close-by previous folks’s dwelling — was taken over for a time by the Lithuanian safety service, which handed it over to the state property company. That company introduced in 2022 that it could put the positioning — an extended, two-story workplace and residing space with an enormous barn connected on the again — up for public sale.

It sits on what has change into invaluable actual property. As soon as empty land throughout a mud highway from the compound is now dotted with just lately constructed properties for rich Lithuanians looking for nation air and forest calm.

As an alternative of promoting the positioning for redevelopment, nevertheless, the property company determined final yr to show it over to Lithuania’s jail service to be used as a coaching heart.

Home windows have been added to the barn, the place, based on former detainees cited in European courtroom rulings, prisoners had been saved shackled in the dead of night and subjected to sleep deprivation, beatings and waterboarding.

A squall of complaints from Poland and different host international locations meant that by 2006, the C.I.A. had been pressured to shut all however two of its eight black websites abroad — Web site Violet and a second jail in an unnamed nation, based on the Senate report, which redacted places. It put the whole variety of prisoners at the moment at 28.

Mr. Banevicius, the neighbor, who was working on the time for the utility firm and noticed how a lot water the previous equestrian heart consumed, mentioned he by no means noticed or heard any proof of abuse of prisoners. However he at all times suspected there have been extra folks within the constructing than the joggers and a handful of others he noticed getting into.

“They used a lot of water for so few people,” he recalled.

Tomas Dapkus contributed reporting from Vilnius, Lithuania.