This is just incredible:
The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.
Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time. …
[…]
Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the “black site” in 2004.
Lithuania — where all but about 15,000 of that country’s pre-World War II Jewish population of 210,000 were murdered by the Nazis. It’s not that the C.IA. torture program is equivalent to the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, but that’s not the point for me. It’s the moral symbolism — and I’m not sure that’s the correct word that expresses how this makes me feel. It’s the profound disrespect for the memory of those tortured and murdered souls, to set up a secret torture site in the heart of where that horror took place. This is my country that did this. I really feel betrayed.
I suppose that decades from now, visitors will be touring these former torture centers just as visitors tour places like Dachau and Auschwitz today.
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