After the Soviet army withdrew in disgrace from Kabul and Kandahar, Benotman returned to his native Libya, where he became one of the leaders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). The group, several hundred strong, sought to overthrow the regime of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, which they believed was corrupt and un-Islamic. Before Sept. 11, 2001, Benotman was an important figure in the expanding global network of terrorism.

Today he sits in a London restaurant and orders an espresso with a glass of water from a waiter dressed in a white uniform. He speaks with a flawless British accent.

Nothing short of spectacular

Benotman has just returned from Libya, where he is working on behalf of the Gadhafi regime, the same regime he hoped to oust only a decade ago. He has been assigned a very delicate task. His job is to convince imprisoned members of his former terrorist group to sign a peace treaty of sorts. He has traveled to Libya 25 times in the last 16 months, and his efforts are paying off. Now, he says, the document that will allow his former comrades to be reintegrated into society is as good as written — and on the verge of being signed.

Under the agreement the terrorists, most of them in prison for many years, will renounce violence and the murder of civilians. It will also include a denial of recent al-Qaida claims that the LIFG has joined forces with the international terrorist organization. This is untrue, says Benotman, explaining that the Libyans distanced themselves from al-Qaida long ago. His new mission is anything but secretive. Arab television broadcaster Al-Jazeera recently reported on his trips to Libya — a story about a former jihadist’s attempt to bring about peace, after all, is nothing short of spectacular.

Libya is not the only place where efforts to part ways with al-Qaida and its founders are under way. Almost seven years after the attacks of Sept. 11 and 10 years after bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, founded the “International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders,” the organization is beginning to show cracks.

If one imagines al-Qaida as experts have characterized it — as a system of terror franchises with branches worldwide — then there is clearly an uprising taking place among many branch managers. They are distancing themselves from the icons of terror, and from their goals and methods. So far, it apparently remains an internal process; disputes within the various groups that have been smoldering for some time are now rising to the surface. And there is little to indicate a causal connection between this development and the United States-led war on global terrorism.

His utmost to kill

Counterterrorism experts from Europe and the United States met in Florence in May to discuss the current state of affairs. Just how many terrorists remain engaged in the war against the West was a matter for debate. But most of the experts believed that bin Laden still exerts direct influence over a widely diverse group of terrorist organizations, both as a symbolic figurehead and as a financier of training camps and attacks around the world. And all at the conference agreed that bin Laden himself remains determined to do his utmost to kill as many people in the West as possible.

The al-Qaida leadership is still believed to be hiding out in the mountainous, inaccessible border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. From their isolated location, bin Laden and Zawahiri compose periodic messages to their followers around the world, often seeking to portray the dissidents as creatures of the hated West. The Egyptian doctor Zawahiri, in particular, insists that renegades like Benotman have either been paid off by the West or tortured into compliance, and that Western intelligence agencies engage in propaganda to create divisions and uncertainty among his holy warriors.

But Zawahiri’s messages, delivered by video or broadcast on the Internet, appear to be losing their effectiveness.

In late May, India’s influential Deoband religious movement issued a fatwa against terrorism. In a joint proclamation at a meeting in New Delhi attended by representatives of the country’s leading Islamic organizations, the groups stated: “It is the goal and purpose of Islam to extinguish all forms of terrorism and to disseminate the message of global peace. Those who use the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad to justify terror are merely upholding a lie.”

The supreme mufti of the Deobandis and three envoys signed the document. “In terms of its theological significance, this is roughly the equivalent of a ruling by the Supreme Court in Washington,” activist Javed Anand later said. The Deobandis, whose name is derived from a small city in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, once inspired and offered religious instruction to fighters in the Islamic world. Militant Pakistani groups, jihadists in Iraq and even the Taliban invoked the Deobandis for many years. But those days are now gone.

Former militants who have renounced jihad often begin to proselytize among their former comrades-in-arms. In late April, a handful of former members of the militant Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which was founded in Jordan in 1953 and eventually spread to about 40 countries, established a foundation to combat fundamentalism among Muslims in Europe.

Maajid Nawaz, 31, is the director of the new organization, known as the Quilliam Foundation. In his past, Nawaz helped develop secret terrorist cells in Pakistan and later in Denmark. He spent five years in an Egyptian prison, where he turned his back on radical Islam. The foundation was established in the British Museum, and when he gave his speech at the event, Nawaz was wearing a well-tailored Hugo Boss suit and his beard was neatly trimmed. “I turned away from Islamism,” he said, “because I recognized it as the curse of Islam.”

“Do not exceed the limits”

This small rebellion within al-Qaida had its beginnings in May 2007, in the form of a fax received at the London-based Arab newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat. It was sent by one of the eminent authorities of al-Qaida, a man who was once bin Laden’s mentor before he went from the Pakistani city of Peshawar to Afghanistan, and long before he became a shining light in the Islamic world. The man’s name is Sayyid Imam al-Sharif. Like Zawahiri, Sharif is an Egyptian doctor, and he later competed with Zawahiri for bin Laden’s favor. Sharif is better known under his nom de guerre, Dr. Fadl.

Ironically Dr. Fadl, 58, sent the fax from a prison in Cairo, where he has been serving a life sentence since 2004. He wrote that jihadism is reprehensible and that it violates the precepts of Islam and Shariah law. Killing people solely on the basis of their nationality is not in keeping with the Koran, he wrote, especially since the victims of such acts are often “innocent Muslims and non-Muslims.” “Fight, on God’s behalf, against those who fight you, but do not exceed the limits,” the converted Dr. Fadl wrote.

A man once referred to as “al-Qaida’s chief ideologue,” and one of the organization’s founders, disassociating himself with al-Qaida, bin Laden and Zawahiri? It was a sensation, a turning point for the terrorist network.

Part 2: “Things are slowly changing”

“When I first read the fax, I thought that he must have been coerced,” says Mohammed al-Shafey, an editor at the London-based Arab newspaper, which printed the document of renunciation. “Fadl was the brain, the think tank of jihad. Only later, when I read his new book, did I realize that he really meant what he wrote.” Dr. Fadl wrote the book Shafey is referring to, in which he explains the reasons for his change of heart, in his prison cell and announced its completion in the fax he sent to London.

Dr. Fadl is not only seen as the brain of al-Qaida but is also considered one of Zawahiri’s mentors. Both men are surgeons and attended medical school in Cairo together. Zawahiri was one of thousands arrested in 1981 after former Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat was assassinated. Fadl fled to Pakistan and settled in Peshawar, where he treated wounded fighters from Afghanistan.

After completing a prison sentence in Cairo, Zawahiri went to Peshawar, then a magnet for Islamists. At that time, it was clear to the two men that Dr. Fadl was the superior intellect. He was said to have encyclopedic knowledge of the Koran.

On Aug. 11, 1988, in Peshawar, Fadl and Zawahiri met for the first time with a young Saudi Arabian named Osama bin Laden and a Palestinian named Abdullah Assam. The four men would later found al-Qaida, “the basis,” as a fighting alliance against infidels, the West and the United States, after the collapse of the world’s other superpower, the Soviet Union. Bin Laden had money and followers, while Fadl and Zawahiri had dreamed up the ideological underpinnings for jihad.

Fadl soon wrote something of a manual for jihadism. According to the document, holy war is the natural state of Islam and the “only way to end the domination of the infidels.” With such a manifesto in his past, Fadl’s renunciation of al-Qaida is not easily dismissed as insignificant.

Greatest trial in history

It is a heavy blow to bin Laden and Zawahiri when one of the founders of their network describes al-Qaida’s ideology and the attacks of Sept. 11 as mistakes. “Dr. Fadl is fundamentally questioning their theological authority,” says Lawrence Wright, who describes the history of al-Qaida in his book “The Looming Tower.” In a recent piece for the New Yorker, Wright wrote, “Fadl repeatedly emphasizes that it is forbidden to kill civilians — including Christians and Jews — unless they are actively attacking Muslims.” Wright believes that the terrorist organization faces the greatest challenge in its history.

Just how seriously Zawahiri took Fadl’s pamphlet of renunciation is evident in the 200-page response he issued in March of this year, which was also published on the Internet. Zawahiri writes that he can only imagine Dr. Fadl’s conversion to be the work of Arab intelligence agencies working in concert with the CIA, and that the document must have been written under duress.

“If you claim that these operations were illegal,” al-Qaida’s number two man writes, addressing Fadl directly, “then this must also apply to all operations conducted in Palestine.” According to Zawahiri, Fadl has never questioned Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

Paul Cruickshank of New York University and terrorism expert Peter Bergen spent six months investigating the turmoil within al-Qaida. The two were the first to interview Noman Benotman, and they also spoke with other critics of the terror organization — including Sheik Salman al-Oudah. On the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Saudi went on the television channel MBS to publicly demand of bin Laden how many innocents had already been killed in the name of al-Qaida. Oudah also wanted to know how bin Laden planned to face the almighty with hundreds, even thousands, of innocent lives on his conscience.

“Al-Oudah is neither in prison nor is he suspected of being a friend of the Americans or a tool of the Saudi government,” says Cruickshank. On the contrary: In 2004, the sheik called on Iraqis to fight against the US occupiers in their country.

Cruickshank believes that, ironically enough, it was the Iraq war that delayed latent criticism of bin Laden and his concept of jihad. “What’s emerging now has been simmering for a long time.” The fact that American soldiers were occupying holy ground provided every major terrorist leader with a convenient justification for jihad in Iraq.

There is no doubt that al-Qaida remains an unscrupulous and dangerous terrorist organization, even if it has lost some of its influence in Iraq. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, its core countries, it is enjoying renewed support. Allied with the newly strengthened Taliban, al-Qaida is doing its part to seriously jeopardize the regimes in Islamabad and Kabul. “In the long term, however, they will face problems as a result of the ideological debate,” says Peter Bergen. “They are already having trouble finding recruits in Europe today.”

Wearing a suit for Friday prayers

This shift in the general mood that experts like Bergen believe is happening in Europe is clearly in evidence at London’s Al-Tawhid Mosque. Two of the presumed attackers who planned, and failed, to commit attacks in London and Glasgow in late June 2007 were frequent visitors to the mosque. “But now people have had enough of Islam constantly being equated with terrorism,” says Usama Hasan, the mosque’s 36-year-old imam.

These days Hasan wears a suit when leading Friday prayers. “I am a Muslim living in the West, and I want everyone to see it.” Hasan, himself a former fighter in Afghanistan and member of a fundamentalist group, now preaches the renunciation of violence and condemns terrorism.

“I have the feeling that things are slowly changing,” says former Libyan terrorist Benotman, referring to the small series of prominent renegades. He was once so well known among jihadists that he dealt directly with bin Laden. That was in the summer of 2000, when roughly 200 people representing groups from many countries came together in Kandahar. Benotman was living in a guesthouse that bin Laden owned.

The Libyans, fearing retaliation against their own country, were opposed to the crusade against the United States that was discussed at such great length in Kandahar. According to Benotman, even Taliban leader Mullah Omar was in favor of attacking Israel instead of the United States. “We told bin Laden at the time that he could not force his strategy on all Arabs,” the Libyan recalls today. “His response was that there was an operation under way that he could no longer stop, and that the fighters were ready to act.” Bin Laden was referring to the attackers of Sept. 11.

After the attacks on America, the Libyans parted ways with al-Qaida. Several Libyan newspapers published Benotman’s open letter to Zawahiri last year. He has been living in London in recent years. He says that he has never been in prison, neither in Libya nor anyplace else.

Then the elegantly dressed man, a one-time jihadist, walks out of the chic restaurant and disappears into the Green Park Underground station.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon.

As Azar later testified, he was forced to sit for seven hours, his hands and feet tied to a chair. He spent the night in a cold metal container, and he received no food for 30 hours. He claimed that U.S. military officers showed him photos of his wife and four children, telling him that unless he cooperated he would never see his family again. He also said that he was photographed while naked and then given a jumpsuit to wear.

A need for this sort of place

On that day, April 7, 2009, President Barack Obama had been in office for exactly 77 days. Shortly after his inauguration, Obama had ordered the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention center and ordered the CIA to give up its secret “black site” prisons. He wanted to shed the dark legacy of the Bush years — there should be no torture anymore, no more secret kidnapping operations of terrorism suspects, no renditions. At least, that was what Obama had promised. He did not mention Bagram in his speeches.

Azar was in Kabul on business. His company had signed contracts with the Pentagon worth $50 million for reconstruction work in Afghanistan. On April 8, Azar was placed onto a Gulfstream and flown to Virginia to face charges. He was accused of having bribed his U.S. Army contact to secure military contracts for his company, and he was later found guilty of bribery.

It was a classic case of corruption, which is not the sort of crime for which a suspect is normally sent to a military prison. No one can explain to Azar why he was taken to Bagram, where the U.S. military treated him like a terrorism suspect and, in doing so, inadvertently provided him with an insight into a world it normally prefers to keep under wraps.

Bagram is “the forgotten second Guantánamo,” says American military law expert Eugene Fidell, a professor at Yale Law School. “But apparently there is a continuing need for this sort of place even under the Obama administration.”

From the beginning, “Bagram was worse than Guantánamo,” says New York-based attorney Tina Foster, who has argued several cases on behalf of detainee rights in U.S. courts. “Bagram has always been a torture chamber.”

And what does Obama say? Nothing. He never so much as mentions Bagram in any of his speeches. When discussing America’s mistreatment of detainees, he only refers to Guantánamo.

Classified location

The Bagram detention facility, by now the largest American military prison outside the United States, is not marked on any maps. In fact, its precise location, somewhere on the periphery of the giant air base northeast of the Afghan capital, is classified. It comprises two sand-colored buildings that resemble airplane hangars, surrounded by tall concrete walls and green camouflage tarps. The facility was set up in 2002 as a temporary prison on the grounds of a former Soviet air base.

Today, the two buildings contain large cages, each with the capacity to hold 25 to 30 prisoners. Up to 1,000 detainees can be held at Bagram at any one time. The detainees sleep on mats, and there is one toilet behind a white curtain for each cage. A $60 million extension is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Unlike Guantánamo, Bagram is located in the middle of the Afghan war zone. But not all the inmates were captured in combat areas. Many terrorism suspects are from other countries and were transported to Bagram for interrogation after being captured. Since the military prison first came into operation, all the detainees there have been classified as “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners of war, which would make them subject to the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

Bagram’s most prominent temporary detainee to date was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed chief architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. After his arrest in Pakistan, Mohammed was initially taken to Bagram for three days and was then held at a secret prison in Poland before being flown to Guantánamo. He told representatives of the Red Cross that he was beaten in Afghanistan, suspended from shackles attached to his hands and sexually humiliated. “I was made to lie on the floor,” he said. “A tube was inserted into my anus and water poured inside.”

“In my view, having visited Guantánamo several times, the Bagram facility made Guantánamo look like a nice hotel,” says military prosecutor Stuart Couch, who was given access to the interior of both facilities. “The men did not appear to be allowed to move around at will, they mostly sat in rows on the floor. It smelled like the monkey house at the zoo.”

Sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation

From the beginning, Bagram was notorious for the brutal forms of torture employed there. Former inmates report incidents of sleep deprivation, beatings and various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex.

Omar Khadr, a Canadian inmate who was 15 at the time, says military personal used him as a living mop. “Military police poured pine oil on the floor and on me. And then, with me lying on my stomach with my hands and feet cuffed together behind me, the military police dragged me back and forth through the mixture of urine and pine oil on the floor.”

At least two men died during imprisonment. One of them, a 22-year-old taxi driver named Dilawar, was suspended by his hands from the ceiling for four days, during which U.S. military personnel repeatedly beat his legs. Dilawar died on Dec. 10, 2002. In the autopsy report, a military doctor wrote that the tissue on his legs had basically been “pulpified.” As it happens, his interrogators had already known — and later testified — that there was no evidence against Dilawar.

According to an internal military investigation of the prisoner abuse cases at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which triggered worldwide outrage when it became public in 2004, the practices there were inspired by the treatment of inmates at Bagram.

Hundreds of innocent inmates

To this day, there are hardly any photos from inside Bagram, and journalists have never been given access to the detention center. Although exact numbers are unknown, there are believed to be about 600 detainees at Bagram, or close to three times as many as there currently are at Guantánamo. According to an as-yet-unpublished 2009 Pentagon report, 400 of the Bagram inmates are innocent and could be released immediately.

The detainees at Bagram still have no right to an attorney, which means that they have no legal recourse against their imprisonment and no opportunity to testify in their cases. Some have been there for years, without knowing why.

Obama has announced new guidelines for the treatment of the Bagram detainees, which would require that a U.S. military official provide assistance to each detainee — not as an attorney but as a personal adviser of sorts. This representative could then review evidence and witness testimony for the first time, and could request that a review board examine the case.

Worst abuse

However, attorney Tina Foster feels that the new initiative is just a cosmetic measure. “There is absolutely no difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration’s position with respect to Bagram detainees’ rights,” she said during an interview.

Foster, a petite 34-year-old with dark brown eyes and black hair, took on the cases of Guantánamo detainees as an attorney with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. That was before she discovered that the worst prisoner abuse happened long before the detainees arrived in Guantánamo — at Bagram.

Since 2005, Foster has worked exclusively with Bagram cases. She has appeared in court to file habeas corpus petitions for three Bagram inmates. Normally, every prisoner is entitled to habeas corpus rights, which would give him the opportunity to petition a U.S. court to investigate the reasons for his arrest.

“This ugly chapter of American history”

In early April of this year, a judge ruled in favor of Foster’s petition, arguing that because her three clients, two Yemenis and a Tunisian, had not been “captured in a battlefield situation” in Afghanistan but instead had been taken to Bagram from a third country, they too had rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. “That was a huge success,” says Foster.

Last Monday, the U.S. Justice Department submitted a 64-page brief to the appeals court, challenging the decision. The Justice Department lawyers argued that, as a military prison in a combat zone, Bagram constitutes a special case.

Foster, who supported Obama during the campaign and then voted for him, is disappointed by her former idol. “When I heard his announcement to close Guantánamo, I breathed a sigh of relief that perhaps this extremely ugly chapter of American history was finally being put to an end,” she says. “Unfortunately, since then, the Obama administration has completely failed in delivering the change that was promised.”

Left in the snow

Foster plans to continue fighting for that cause, even though one of her clients, whose witness testimony figured prominently in her case, is now dead. Jawed Ahmad, who was also known as Jojo Yazemi, was a journalist working in Afghanistan for a Canadian television station. He was 22 when he was arrested in October 2007.

The Americans accused him of being in contact with the Taliban. They incarcerated Yazemi at Bagram, where he became just another “enemy combatant” — detainee No. 3,370. They left him standing in the snow for six hours, beat him, threatened him and submitted him to sleep deprivation for weeks. It was only after fellow journalists in New York launched a major media campaign in support of Yazemi that he was released — after 11 months and without any explanation as to why he had been detained in the first place.

Just six months after his release, gunmen driving a white Toyota pickup truck, the kind favored by many Taliban, shot and killed Yazemi in Kandahar. “It was one of the most terrible moments of my life,” says Tina Foster. “He was a great person and a friend.” And he was also Foster’s star witness in her case against Bagram.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe’s most-read newsmagazine, visit Spiegel Online or subscribe to the daily newsletter.

“My eyes were covered with a cloth tied around my head. A cloth bag was then pulled over my head … I fell asleep … I therefore don’t know how long the journey lasted.”

Jerry M., age 56 at the time, probably sat at the controls of the plane chartered by the CIA. The trained airplane and helicopter pilot had been hired by Aero Contractors, a company that transferred prisoners around the world for U.S. intelligence agencies. According to documents from the European aviation safety agency Eurocontrol, Jerry M. had taken off from Kabul at 8:51 a.m. that morning. Only hours after landing in Poland, at 7:16 p.m., he took off again, headed for Washington.

A large number of Polish and American intelligence operatives have since gone on record that the CIA maintained a prison in northeastern Poland. Independent of these sources, Polish government officials from the Justice and Defense Ministry have also reported that the Americans had a secret base near Szymany airport. And so began on March 7, 2003, one of the darkest chapters of recent American — and European — history.

Obama under pressure

It was apparently here, just under an hour’s drive from Szymany airport, that Sheikh Mohammed was tortured exactly 183 times with waterboarding — an interrogation technique that simulates the sensation of drowning — in March 2003 alone. That averages out to eight times a day. And all of this happened right here in Europe.

Over six years later, these acts of torture are putting President Obama under intense pressure. On the one hand, he released four memos in which his predecessor George W. Bush had legalized such interrogation methods. On the other hand, he decided not to prosecute the torturers. And he initially neglected to launch investigations into these “special interrogation methods.”

It is the decision that has earned Obama the harshest criticism during the first 100 days of his presidency. Democrats from the Senate and the House of Representatives announced last week that they would form a truth commission, essentially putting them at odds with their own president. Obama quickly realized that he had apparently underestimated the volatile nature of the issue. So he had Attorney General Eric Holder announce that no one stood above the law. Holder promised that an investigation would be conducted to find out who in the White House and the Justice Department had declared these methods legal.

What the CIA did back then to prisoners in the Polish military airbase of Stare Kiejkuty, north of Szymany, had been authorized by the president. According to witnesses, Stare Kiejkuty housed a secret CIA prison for “high value detainees” — for the most prominent prisoners of the war on terror.

There is now no doubt that the Gulfstream N379P landed at least five times at Szymany between February and July 2003. Flight routes were manipulated and falsified for this purpose and, with the knowledge of the Polish government, the European aviation safety agency Eurocontrol was deliberately deceived.

The public prosecutor’s office in Warsaw has the statement of a witness who described how people wearing handcuffs and blindfolds were led from the aircraft at Szymany. He said that this happened far away from the control tower. According to the witness, it was always the same individuals and the same civilian vehicles that stood waiting on the landing field.

If we are to believe the statements of Sheikh Mohammed, a large number of those present at the small airfield wore ski masks. This is what he told a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross that questioned him in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo, Cuba, in late 2006:

“On arrival the transfer from the airport to the next place of detention took about one hour. I was transported sitting on the floor of a vehicle. I could see at one point that there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing black, with masks and army boots, like Planet-X people.”

Just under an hour’s drive corresponds roughly to the distance from Szymany to the Stare Kiejkuty military base, known as a training camp for Polish intelligence agents. The route there passes for two kilometers through a fenced-off military zone, past dense pine forests, then heads northeast for 20 minutes, and finally leads over an unpaved road alongside a lake. The entrance to the base is at the end of this road.

“I was never threatened with death”

Sheikh Mohammed said that they cut the clothes from his body, photographed him naked and threw him in a 10-by-13-foot cell with wooden walls. That was when the hardest phase of the interrogating began, he claims. According to Sheikh Mohammed, one of his interrogators told him that they had received the green light from Washington to give him a “hard time”:

“They never used the word ‘torture’ and never referred to ‘physical pressure,’ only to ‘a hard time.’ I was never threatened with death; in fact I was told that they would not allow me to die, but that I would be brought to the ‘verge of death and back again.’”

He says he was questioned roughly eight hours a day. He spent the first month naked and standing, with his hands chained to the ceiling of the cell, even at night. They led them into another room for questioning, he says. That’s where the bed stood that he says he was strapped to for waterboarding. The mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks told members of the Red Cross that he eventually realized where he was being held:

“I think the country was Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had an e-mail address ending in ‘.pl’. The central-heating system was an old-style one that I would expect only to see in countries of the former communist system.”

Thereafter, the al-Qaida operative described how he was strapped to a special bed and submitted to waterboarding:

“Cold water from a bottle that had been kept in the fridge was then poured onto the cloth by one of the guards so that I could not breathe. This obviously could only be done for one or two minutes at a time. The cloth was then removed and the bed put into a vertical position. The whole process was then repeated during about an hour. Injuries to my ankles and wrists also occurred during the waterboarding as I struggled in the panic of not being able to breathe.”

Part 2: Investigations across Europe

For more than a year now, Warsaw public prosecutor Robert Majewski has been investigating former Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller’s government on allegations of abuse of office. At issue is whether sovereignty over Polish territory was relinquished, and whether former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and his left-leaning Social Democratic government gave the CIA free reign over sections of the Stare Kiejkuty military base for the agency’s extraterritorial torture interrogations.

Majewski has questioned a large number of witnesses who worked in the former government, and this year his team even plans to fly to Guantánamo. “No European country is so sincerely and vigorously investigating former members of the government as is currently the case in Poland,” says Wolfgang Kaleck from the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin, which supports the investigations.

The public prosecutor’s office has also launched a probe to determine whether the Polish intelligence agency made 20 of its agents available to the CIA, as was recently reported by the conservative Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita. A former CIA official confirmed this information. There was reportedly a document issued by the intelligence agency that mentioned both the 20 Polish agents and the transfer of the military base to the Americans. Two members of a parliamentary investigative committee in Warsaw had an opportunity to view this document in late 2005, but it has since disappeared.

The missing piece of evidence

Journalist Mariusz Kowalewski at Rzeczpospolita and two colleagues have been searching for months now for proof of the existence of a secret CIA base in Poland. The journalists have discovered flight record books from Szymany that had been declared lost, and based on refueling receipts and currency exchange rates, they have reconstructed flights and routes, and spoken with informants. Over the past few weeks, their newspaper and the television network TVP Info have revealed new details on an almost daily basis.

Kowalewski has collected a wide range of documents on his white Apple laptop. He is convinced, though, that he only knows “a fraction of what actually happened.” He is certain that there was a CIA base in the Masuria region, where high-ranking al-Qaida prisoners were brought. All that is missing is the final piece of evidence. There are rumors circulating that one of the most important interrogators of Sheikh Mohammed, an American named Deuce Martinez — the man who didn’t torture him, but rather had the task of gently coaxing information out of him — was in Poland at the time. That is the proof that’s still missing.

Similar conclusions were reached by the second investigative report on CIA kidnappings in Europe, which was submitted two years ago by the special investigator of the Council of Europe, Dick Marty. According to Marty’s report, members of the former Polish military intelligence and counterintelligence agency, WSI, were given positions with the border police, customs and airport administration to safeguard the activities of the CIA. “The latest revelations in Poland fully corroborate my evidence, which is based on testimony by insiders and documents that have been leaked to me,” says the investigator today. Now, under the “dynamic force of the truth” that Obama has unleashed, Marty says that Europeans must finally reveal “which governments tolerated and supported the illegal practices of the CIA.”

All that remains is the question of who in Poland at the time approved the collaboration with the CIA and gave the Americans unencumbered use of sections of Stare Kiejkuty.

“The order to give the CIA everything they needed came from the very top, from the president,” a member of the Polish military intelligence agency told the Marty team in 2007. Kwasniewski denies this. He says that there was close intelligence corporation with the U.S., but no prisons on Polish soil. When asked to comment on the reports, former Prime Minister Miller said: “All of this is just another opportunity for me to say that I have nothing to say.”

It’s very possible that the debate on torture and responsibility which is currently being conducted in the U.S. will soon also reach Europe. After all, Germany granted the U.S. flyover rights and dropped its bid to extradite 13 CIA operatives in the case of Khalid el-Masri, a German citizen who claims he was abducted by the Americans. The Italian intelligence agency allegedly assisted the CIA with the kidnapping in Milan of the Islamic cleric Abu Omar. Britain’s intelligence agency, MI6, reportedly delivered information directly to CIA agents who were conducting interrogations in Morocco. And there are also reports of a secret prison in Romania. Investigations have been launched into these allegations in nearly all of these countries.

Jerry M., the pilot who flew Sheikh Mohammed from Kabul to Szymany in March, 2003, now lives in Birmingham, Ala., in a brick house with white shutters and box trees planted in front of the door. Two stone lions guard the path that leads to the entrance. For two years, Jerry M. only had a post box address, like everyone else who flew CIA prisoners around the world: P.O. Box 22 99 43, code name Jerry Allen Bostick.

It appears the 62-year-old would rather deny all knowledge of this period in his life. When asked by a reporter over the phone if he had ever been to Poland, he said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Really no idea.” When he was asked if he had ever worked for a company named Aero Contractors, the line suddenly went dead. Jerry M. had hung up.

Translated from the German by Paul Cohen