Valdas Adamkus

Lithuania drops CIA prison inquiry

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Farsi News Agency, March 14, 2015

TEHRAN (FNA)- The Lithuanian legislature decided against a new inquiry into a secret US torture facility in the country, despite a damning US Senate report released three months ago which indicated its existence.

“No new inquest will be considered, because there is no longer sufficient support for it among parliament members,” Loreta Grauziniene, speaker of the Lithuanian parliament, told Reuters on Friday.

Allegations that the CIA set up and ran a secret detention center near the country’s capital of Vilnius between 2004 and 2006 were investigated in 2009 and 2010 by a parliamentary committee. The inquiry concluded the CIA did operate flights in and out of Lithuania, and that there may have been as many as two secret facilities for what the CIA termed “enhanced interrogations.” The committee added that such information could not be confirmed because US officials refused to cooperate.

When a heavily redacted US Senate report on secret CIA prisons came out in December 2014, it did not identify any countries by name. However, the descriptions of the facility identified as ‘Violet’ closely matched the Lithuanian parliament’s original report. Arvydas Anusauskas, the lawmaker who led the inquiry, told the media that the Senate report had made a “convincing case” that prisoners had been held in Lithuania. Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius expressed hope that there would be another parliamentary inquiry, and that information would be “shared and exchanged” this time around.

Former president Valdas Adamkus, however, insisted to the local media that he would continue to believe “there were no prisons or prisoners in Lithuania” until he saw “documents before my eyes” proving him wrong.

No further explanation was given for Friday’s decision to drop the inquiry. It comes as hundreds of US troops and vehicles deploy to Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia as a “deterrent” to alleged Russian aggression.

Human rights groups have criticized Lithuania’s complicity in the CIA’s secret detention program, as well as its reluctance to investigate claims by Guantanamo Bay detainees Abu Zubaydah and Mustafa al-Hawsawi of being held and tortured at the CIA facility in the country.

http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13931223000734

U.S. citizens continue to infiltrate Eastern European governments

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Posted on Strategic Culture, December 30, 2014
by Wayne Madsen

The recent appointment of the austerity-loving U.S. citizen and investment firm chief Natalie Jaresko as Ukraine’s Finance Minister continues a trend that has seen one Eastern European country after another appointing or electing U.S. citizens as major government officials. Jaresko had Ukrainian citizenship conferred on her by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko as she arrived in Kiev to take up her new post in the government of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, himself a former legal U.S. resident who has been linked to the crypto-Satanic Church of Scientology.

Jaresko is involved in contentious asset redistribution court battles with her ex-husband, Ihor Figlus. Together, the two managed the Kiev-based Horizon Capital, established 20 years ago with a $150 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Horizon Capital operated the Emerging Europe Growth Fund, a group charged with illegal insider trading of Ukrainian securities. According to court divorce documents, Horizon Capital bought Ukrainian artwork, Georgian carpets, expensive cars, and antique furniture, all of which are now subject to the battle for ownership between Jaresko and Figlus. Jaresko also managed the USAID-financed Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), a CIA contrivance that steered U.S. investment dollars into «pro-democracy» movements in Moldova and Belarus and laundered much of the $5 billion in U.S. aid for the Maidan Square coup in Kiev that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych.

Jaresko’s arrival in Kiev was shortly followed by that of former Reno, Nevada assistant police chief Ron Glensor, who became an official adviser to the Ukrainian police with an initial posting at the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Khmelnytsky region. Glensor has been very active with the U.S. Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP). Glensor is also a former fellow of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) in Washington, D.C. In August 1999, The Progressive magazine reported that «Janice Stromsen, a career employee of the Justice Department who served as ICITAP’s director, resisted the program’s takeover by CIA elements. In February [1999], Stromsen was relieved of her duties after complaining to the Justice Department Inspector General that ICITAP was being used by the CIA to recruit agents among foreign police officials». Continue reading →