PressEurop yesterday came forward with an obscure piece of news from Poland that may nonetheless soon resonate internationally. Citing an article in that day’s edition of the mainstream Polish national daily Rzeczpospolita, they noted that no less than Polish ex-President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, his ex-premier Leszek Miller, and an “ex-head of intelligence,” one Zbigniew Siemiątkowski, were facing the prospect of going before a State Tribunal on war crimes charges stemming from the secret prison they allegedly allowed the American CIA to set up in their country back when the “War on Terror” was at its height, and which might well have been the scene for prisoner torture.

Good work, that, although the PressEurop editors did somehow miss within that Rzeczpospolita piece the credit that journal was willing to give to its arch-rival Gazeta Wyborcza for actually getting the scoop, in the form of this article which appeared the day before the Rzecz report. Also, Zbigniew Siemiątkowski was not “head of intelligence” but rather Minister of the Interior; and there is another ex-Minister of the Interior who is under investigation in this connection as well, one Krzysztof Janik.

In any event, the combined reporting from Poland’s two most-respected national dailies provides a fascinating glimpse into a story with explosive potential that still is being treated as a Top Secret matter by the prosecutorial authorities involved. As the Gazeta piece reminds us, the first indication the world had that something funny was going on in Europe was the reporting in the Washington Post of early 2005 that alleged the existence of CIA-run “black site” prison facilities in European countries. The Council of Europe then took that as a cue to investigate on its own, and soon concluded that such installations were in place in Romania, Lithuania, and Poland. When questioned at the time, Polish authorities were noticeably unhelpful, eventually admitting only that yes, there was an airport in the northeastern Polish wilderness that the government had made available for CIA flights. (more…)

Ah, don’t we just know the feeling . . .

I picked up this story originally from the Dutch paper De Volkskrant (Rather in the cell than at home with spouse), but just a little work with Google News Italia brought me to an authentic Italian report of this case, with a bit more detail, in Il Messaggero (Better jail than wife. And he renounces house-arrest).

This 56-year-old guy in Viterbo, Italy, see, got himself arrested for standing on the railroad tracks at the station in the town of Orte. (This is in the Lazio region just north of Rome.) He was drunk at the time – and so compounded his original offence of interrupting a public service with resisting arrest and threatening a public official – and was sentenced by the judge to five months’ house-arrest. But he pleaded with the judge for mercy: “For me it would be impossible to spend such a long period with my wife. We constantly argue and I would not be able to leave the house to not have to hear her insults. I don’t know how I could make it to the end.”

The judge made a game attempt to convince the defendant of the merits of house-arrest, but quickly just gave in and let him serve his five months at the local prison. By the way, that facility is in Viterbo and is known as the Mammagialla prison. Mamma-GIAL-la!! – doesn’t that sound like it should be the name of a spaghetti or something?