First arrived containers loaded with equipment for a secluded property underneath renovation on the edge of the forest. It had housed a horseback driving academy and a cafe, but was staying reconfigured for a mysterious organization.
Then muscular young adult males appeared, jogging by the trees at bizarre hrs and speaking to one an additional in English.
Juozas Banevicius, who watched the comings and goings in the small settlement of Antaviliai, Lithuania, nearly 20 years back, recalled wondering it a bit odd that the newcomers would shoo away anyone who came close to the protection fence they experienced put up close to their residence, which was formerly open up to the public.
“Nobody realized what they ended up undertaking inside of,” recalled Mr. Banevicius, 66.
The remedy has been subjected to intensive information media and judicial scrutiny in the yrs because. It has all pointed to the similar conclusion: The village of Antaviliai was property to a top secret C.I.A. detention and torture heart, a single of a few so-called black internet sites that the agency set up in Japanese Europe right after the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults.
In January, the European Courtroom of Human Rights dominated that a mystery jail code-named Site Violet had “beyond affordable doubt” been found in Lithuania. It did not identify Antaviliai, which is around the funds, Vilnius, but the village is the only spot in the nation that Lithuanian officials have acknowledged as a site of a former C.I.A. facility — though they insist it was not a jail.
Site Violet featured in a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014 following an investigation on the C.I.A.’s use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation methods.” According to the report, the site operated from February 2005 right up until Oct 2006, when it shut mainly because of unspecified “medical problems.”
The court ruling in January concluded that Lithuania experienced violated the European Conference on Human Legal rights “because of its complicity in the C.I.A. magic formula detainee method.”
Poland, which initially denied hosting a mystery American jail acknowledged as Web page Blue, acknowledged following the Senate investigation that it had allow the C.I.A. keep terrorism suspects on its territory. The Polish president at the time, Aleksander Kwasniewski, insisted he was unaware of the severe approaches used by American interrogators.
By contrast, several court docket circumstances and investigations have only strengthened in Lithuania a carapace of official secrecy — and shows of loyalty to the United States by a susceptible Baltic state fearful of an ever more intense Russia.
Lithuania’s well-documented complicity in C.I.A. torture, explained Kestutis Girnius, a historian at Vilnius University, “is not a little something anyone in this article needs to discuss about. They buried the full issue at the commence and have ongoing to bury it.”
A significant rationale for that, he said, was the dependence of his state, a NATO member sandwiched in between Belarus and the greatly militarized Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on the United States for its security. But, he questioned: “Do we really have to be so obsequious? When The us claims soar, we only check with, ‘How higher?’”
Also exasperated is Egidijus Kuris, a Lithuanian decide on the European Court docket of Human Legal rights, in Strasbourg, France. “The evidence that there was a prison is apparent. The evidence that there were being people there is apparent. There is no pretending listed here that it was not,” he explained right after a ruling versus his country in 2018. “And nonetheless we still question, ‘Do you consider there was a prison?’”
Aspect of the explanation for this, he suggested, was that no one in energy preferred to dig into what took place to a part of the thousands and thousands of bucks offered by the C.I.A. to finance a magic formula jail in Lithuania that the country’s Parliament identified was not effectively accounted for. “Whoever pocketed the revenue in Lithuania will have to be discovered,” Mr. Kuris reported.
In 2009, when ABC News determined Antaviliai as a previous C.I.A. black web site, the Lithuanian Parliament shaped a committee to examine. It concluded that the country’s Condition Security Section, or V.S.D., had acquired cash for unspecified “joint actions” and that its accounting experienced been “inappropriate.”
V.S.D. denied this, indicating that it had “strictly” accounted for all cash and that “there had been no hundreds of thousands leaked wherever.”
The parliamentary investigation did not attain a summary on no matter whether the magic formula jail experienced existed. Even though flight facts and other circumstantial evidence indicated that detainees could have been introduced into Lithuania secretly, it found, irrespective of whether this had happened could not be decided.
The closest Lithuania has arrive to acknowledging that the C.I.A. ran a detention middle on its territory was in 2009, when President Dalia Grybauskaite, who took office three several years after the People experienced remaining, said she experienced “indirect suspicions” of a magic formula jail.
If all those suspicions were being accurate, she reported, “Lithuania need to cleanse by itself, choose accountability and apologize.” It was also time, she additional, for the United States “to give answers.”
Her reviews dismayed the U.S. Embassy in Lithuania, which experienced been doing work efficiently for a long time to retain the situation out of the public eye. It wrote in a cable that was afterwards posted on the internet by WikiLeaks that the president experienced “inexplicably offered new lifetime to an unsubstantiated tale, reflecting a absence of political seasoning.”
“Rather than help quiet a story that does not replicate favorably on Lithuania, her reviews alternatively have prompt that there may perhaps be a kernel of truth of the matter to the allegations,” the cable reported.
Since then, officials have stayed silent. Talking about Web site Violet would elevate issues about the lacking revenue and give material for propaganda to Russia, which delights in pointing out American sins even though flaunting its own use of torture, as it did last month with the launch of movie footage demonstrating the brutal treatment method of suspects detained in link with the terrorist attack in close proximity to Moscow last month.
In its ruling in January, the European Courtroom in Strasbourg requested Lithuania to pay 100,000 euros, or about $108,000, to a Saudi citizen who judges established experienced been held in the Baltic nation. Lithuania’s Justice Ministry stated very last week that it would comply with the get, stating it was obliged to do so “regardless of whether or not it agrees or disagrees with the court’s reasoning.”
The European Court docket notified Lithuania in March that it had acknowledged a 3rd case relating to Website Violet. This was brought by a suspected Qaeda terrorist, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is now detained in the U.S. armed service prison in Guantánamo Bay and promises he was held and tortured for five months by the C.I.A. in Lithuania. He won past cases in opposition to Poland and Romania for unlawful detention in those people nations.
The Justice Ministry reported it prepared to challenge the new promises and argue, as it has earlier devoid of results, “that all the evidence regarding the applicant’s detention in Lithuania is oblique and that the standards of evidence should be distinctive.”
Internet site Violet in Lithuania was shut down in late 2006 right after neighborhood protection officers, cautious of attracting consideration, refused to confess to a healthcare facility a C.I.A. detainee, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who necessary treatment method for a professional medical unexpected emergency, in accordance to the Senate report.
After the C.I.A. still left, the home — absolutely free of potentially prying neighbors besides for Mr. Banevicius and residents of a nearby outdated people’s dwelling — was taken about for a time by the Lithuanian security services, which handed it about to the state property company. That company introduced in 2022 that it would place the web site — a very long, two-story office environment and dwelling spot with a massive barn attached at the back — up for auction.
It sits on what has become useful real estate. When vacant land throughout a dirt road from the compound is now dotted with lately developed residences for wealthy Lithuanians trying to get region air and forest relaxed.
Instead of advertising the web page for redevelopment, nonetheless, the house company determined past year to switch it around to Lithuania’s jail company for use as a education middle.
Home windows have been additional to the barn, in which, according to former detainees cited in European court docket rulings, prisoners ended up saved shackled in the dark and subjected to slumber deprivation, beatings and waterboarding.
A squall of complaints from Poland and other host international locations meant that by 2006, the C.I.A. had been compelled to close all but two of its 8 black sites abroad — Web site Violet and a second jail in an unnamed country, in accordance to the Senate report, which redacted places. It set the whole amount of prisoners at that time at 28.
Mr. Banevicius, the neighbor, who was functioning at the time for the utility company and observed how considerably h2o the former equestrian centre consumed, claimed he never observed or heard any evidence of abuse of prisoners. But he constantly suspected there ended up more men and women in the developing than the joggers and a handful of other individuals he observed moving into.
“They used a whole lot of water for so number of folks,” he recalled.
Tomas Dapkus contributed reporting from Vilnius, Lithuania.
