ANTAVILIA, Lituania. A former horse riding academy located in Antavilia, Lithuania has been identified as a ‘black site’ for suspected terrorists detained by the CIA says Russia Today. The property which is located in a forest, 20 kilometers northeast of the capital Vilnius, was owned by a local family until March 2004, when it was bought by Elite LLC, a CIA front, registered in Delaware, Panama and Washington, DC.
News first broke at ABC which stated that the Lithuania authorities agreed to this arrangement after a visit by President George W. Bush to that country in 2002 with pledge of US support for its membership to the NATO Alliance. Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant, and former US counterterrorism czar, noted that “the new members of NATO were so grateful for the U.S. role in getting them into that organization that they would do anything the U.S. asked for during that period. They were eager to please and eager to be cooperative on security and on intelligence matters,” he said. Lithuania, Poland, and Romania were believed to be three eastern European countries where the CIA secretly interrogated suspected high-value al-Qaeda terrorists, using questionable techniques. Read ABC report here.
In Lithuania, over a period of months, tight-lipped contractors from the US converted the riding stables into a large two story building without windows, ringed with metal fences and security cameras. The site may have held as many as eight high valued suspects for more than a year.
The CIA closed that door in 2005, after public disclosure of the black sites program. The “stable” is now owned by the Lithuania Secret Police who refused to allow the networks to visit inside its iron gates. One Lithuanian says she is not particularly proud of her country’s participation in this matter.
