If the answer is “thousands,” then the question becomes: Are they being tortured, too? And if the answer is “zero,” then the question becomes: Where did they go?

But first, let’s look at the context and the circumstantial evidence for a Bush gulag at Stare Kiejkuty, from the recently released Draft Report on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transportation and
illegal detention of prisoners by the European Commisson (PDF) To experienced, cynical American eyes, the cover-up is quite obvious.

The European Parliament:

19. Recalls that some journalists at the Washington Post and ABC News, as they confirmed to the temporary committee, were put under pressure not to name the eastern European countries, namely Poland and Romania, where there were said to have been secret detention facilities;

32. Stresses that at least 1,245 flights operated by the CIA (PDF) have flown into the European airspace or stopped over at European airports;

132. Deplores the lack of cooperation by the Polish Government with the temporary committee, in particular when receiving its delegation at an inappropriate level; deeply regrets that all those representatives of the Polish Government and parliament who were invited to do so, declined to meet the temporary committee;

137. Regrets that, following the hearings carried out by the temporary committee delegation in Poland, there were contradictory statements and confusion about flight logs for the above-mentioned CIA flights, which were first said not to have been retained, then said to have been faxed and destroyed and finally said to have been saved in an unspecified place;

Clumsy! One can see that the Poles have little experience in being a successful client state.

140. Takes note of the declarations made by Szymany airport employees according to which:

— in 2002, two Gulfstream jets, and in 2003, four Gulfstream jets with civilian registration numbers were parked at the edge of the airport, and did not enter customs clearance;

— orders were given directly by the regional border guards about the arrivals of the aircraft referred to, emphasising that the airport authorities should not approach the aircraft and that military staff and services alone were to handle those aircraft and only to complete the technical arrangements after the landing;

— according to a former senior official of the airport, no Polish civilian or military staff was permitted to approach the aircraft;

— landing fees were paid in cash and overpriced - usually between EUR 2 000 and EUR 4 000;

— one or two vehicles would wait for the arrival of those aircraft;

— the vehicles had military registration numbers starting with “H”, which are associated with the intelligence training base in nearby Stare Kiejkuty;

— in one case a medical emergency vehicle, belonging to either the police academy or the military base, was involved;

Presumably some doctors were upholding their Hippocratic oaths by ensuring that torture didn’t actually kill the inmates.

— one airport staff member reported once following the vehicles and seeing them heading towards the intelligence training centre at Stare Kiejkuty.

144. Considers that, in the light of the above serious circumstantial evidence, a temporary secret detention facility may have been located at the intelligence training centre at Stare Kiejkuty;

So, what does the “temporary” “secret” facility at Stare Kiejkuty look like? Read on:

From the UK’s Sunday Mirror:

Sunday Mirror investigators last week breached the one-mile security cordon around the complex in the muddy village of Stare Kiejkuty, 100 miles from the Polish capital of Warsaw. Many of the 250 locals have family working as army conscripts on the other side of a new Iron Curtain - a three-mile long, two-metre high fence.

Posing as tourists visiting the village in Poland’s equivalent of the Lake District, we rented a chalet 400 metres from the main entrance of the base.

Despite claims the site has high-tech surveillance - including infra-red thermal sensors to detect body heat - it seems little has changed from its 1970s Communist-era role as a base to train Soviet agents and assassins. British traitor Kim Philby taught at the base.

The car park contained at least 25 vehicles. At least three watch-towers had been left abandoned, and 150metres away was a green hangar the size of a football pitch. Locals say this was built last year to house newly-arrived inmates. Other buildings in the complex consist of three fortified bunkers above ground and a firing range.

Now, a newly built hangar the size of a football pitch doesn’t seem like a “temporary facility” to me. So we need to consider the possibility that the European Parliament may well have been pulling its punches with that “temporary” language.

So, let’s do some arithmetic. A football pitch is 100-130 yards deep, and 100-50 yards wide. Let’s assume the largest possible size for the hangar, since Halliburton (say) got the contract. 130 x 100 is 13,000 square yards. Assume a three-story hangar: 13,000 x 3 = 39,000 sq yds. Assume only 2/3 of the space is used for prisoners: Call it 25,000 square yards. Assume a cell is 3 x 3 yards, or 9 sq yds. 25,000 / 9 = 2777, call it 2500 cells.

So, 2500 cells in Stare Kiejkuty. If there’s a second gulag in Romania (the other state in “New Europe” that behaves in the same guilty way as Poland), that’s 5000 cells available.

If two inmates go in a cell, that’s ample capacity for the 7000 estimate for the inmate population in Bush’s gulag. (The 35,000 estimate would, of course, mean more gulags, or the start of serious overcrowding.)

So, as we’ve been arguing since for early 2005, the Bush program of extrarordinary rendition is not, as it is so often presented in our famously free press, a small program involving onesies and twosies of “the worst of the worst” being flown about in small executive jets: It is a large scale program involving thousands of prisoners and a large detention apparatus. The Gitmo problem, though critical legally and constitutionally, is an order of magnitude smaller than the gulag problem; 700 at Gitmo versus thousands in the Bush gulag.

There is, of course, the possibility that the hangar, though large, is empty, and no prisoners are being kept there. However, the prisoners were rendered; we have the flight records, as well as the circumstantial evidence. So where are they now? Je repete:

1. They could still be on ice in the gulags. But where? 7,0000 (or 8,500, or 14,000, or 35,000) is a lot of people to imprison permanently.

2. Bush could have taken a cue from some of the practices of the Argentinian and Chilean secret services in the dirty wars of the 1970s—whose brutal and authoritarian practices the administration has been so anxious to emulate in so many ways.

Researchers have the tail numbers of many of the planes used for renditions.

It would be interesting to know if any of these planes had cargo doors that could be opened over the ocean.

Yes, the inmate population could be zero, since all the inmates had been disappeared. Of course, that would mean that the Bush administration would have sunk to unheard-of levels of depraved indifference to ethical norms and legal obligations, but then that’s already happened many times over, hasn’t it?

NOTE 1 The circumstantial evidence for Stare Kiejkuty in the report mentions only executive jets. However, we know that N313P, a 737, landed at least once near Stare Kiejkuty.

NOTE 2 An American in Romania has a 16-part series on the Bush gulag, with many translations from European sources. European Parliament report cited here.