After appealing the ruling in February, Poland has finally decided to abide by the European Court of Human Rights decision to pay reparations to a pair of detainees tortured at a CIA black site on Polish soil.
The payments were $147,000 to Abu Zubaydah, and $113,000 to Abdel Rahim al-Nashiri. both for allowing their detention to failing to stop “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.”
Zubaydah’s lawyer says his client intends the money to go to an organization helping women and children displaced during wars.
Though the terms of the detention have never been made public, Poland reportedly received millions of dollars from the US for allowing the CIA black site, meaning Poland still turned a profit on the deal.
These poor Poles, threatened by bad, bad Putin. Right?
Right. Putin's biker gang stunt ultimately fizzled out into a fiasco that made him look ridiculous but the claim that his biker supporters would (and could) break into Poland and Germany by force to "commemorate" the Red Army's march to Berlin was a direct threat to those two countries, all the more so as it seemed to explain how much the same people suddenly popped up in Crimea without anyone seeing them arrive.
A lovely example of how times have changed. When all this happened, the then Polish government saw itself as doing a favour for its best friend, the one who was going to stand by Poland through thick and thin, defending it, if need be, from any country that threatened it. A similar story is running in Germany over German intelligence services' aid to US intelligence services. If the US asked for such help now, it probably wouldn't get it. Amused by Mr Ditz's very weak effort to turn this into a smear: Poland has "finally" "decided to abide by" the ECHR decision. The only Council of Europe Member State that ever refused to comply with an ECHR decision is Russia and its C of E membership has been suspended, as was Greece's during the colonels dictatorship.
When will the USA start paying reparations?
Does anyone else here smell the Troll?