First, some background. Al Nashiri captured in Dubai, in September, 2002. A month later he was transferred to CIA custody. He was flown to "the salt pit" in Afghanistan where he was tortured.

During his detention, the interrogators subjected him to prolonged stress standing positions, during which his wrists were shackled to a bar or hook in the ceiling above the head for at least two days.

Then he was flown to Thailand where he was waterboarded.

From there the CIA had him flown to Poland, where he was tortured some more at a black hole site in Stare Kiejkuty. "The flight flew from Bangkok via Dubai and landed in Szymany, Poland, on 5 December 2002....The fact that the applicant was transferred to a secret detention site on 5 December 2002 and then tortured is confirmed in paragraph 224 of the of the 2004 CIA Report."

Polish officials cleared Al-Nashiri's flight (among others) for arrival at Szymany airport. The Court reviewed a letter from the Polish Border Guard Office confirming this.

Why Szymany? One likely reason:

Szymany is described by the Chairman of the Polish delegation to PACE as a ‘former Defence Ministry airfield’, located near the rural town of Szczytno in the North of the country. It is close to a large facility used by the Polish intelligence services, known as the Stare Kiejkuty base..... According to [one] report...the centre was located at the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence training base.

Here's where the powerdrill and handgun techniques come in (the use of these techniques later became the subject of an OIG investigation):

The debriefer assessed Al-Nashiri as withholding information, at which point [REDACTED] reinstated [REDACTED] hooding, and handcuffing. Sometime between 28 December 2002 and 1 January 2003, the debriefer used an unloaded semi-automatic handgun as a prop to frighten Al-Nashiri into disclosing information. After discussing this plan with [REDACTED] the debriefer entered the cell where Al-Nashiri sat shackled and racked [racking is a mechanical procedure used with firearms to chamber a bullet or simulate a bullet being chambered] the handgun once or twice close to Al-Nashiri’s head.

On what was probably the same day debriefer used a power drill to frighten Al-Nashiri. [REDACTED] consent, the debriefer entered the detainee’s cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded. The debriefer did not touch Al-Nashiri with the power drill.

The [REDACTED] and debriefer did not request authorization or report the use of these unauthorized techniques to Headquarters.

So what happened with the investigation of this creep?

OIG investigated and referred its findings to the Criminal Division of DoJ. On 11 September 2003, DoJ declined to prosecute and turned these matters over to CIA for disposition. These incidents are the subject of a separate OIG Report of Investigation.

There was physical torture as well:

97. [REDACTED] OIG received reports that interrogation team members employed potentially injurious stress positions on Al-Nashiri. Al-Nashiri was required to kneel on the floor and lean back. On at least one occasion, an Agency officer reportedly pushed AI-Nashiri backward while he was in this stress position. On another occasion [REDACTED] said he had to intercede after [REDACTED] expressed concern that Al-Nashiri’s arms might be dislocated from his shoulders. [REDACTED] explained that, at the time, the interrogators were attempting to put Al-Nashiri in a standing stress position. Al-Nashiri was reportedly lifted off the floor by his arms while his arms were bound behind his back with a belt.

There was also the "stiff brush and shackles."

98 [REDACTED] interrogator reported that he witnessed other techniques used on Al-Nashiri that the interrogator knew were not specifically approved by DoJ. These included the use of a stiff brush that was intended to induce pain on Al-Nashiri and standing on Al-Nashiri’s shackles, which resulted in cuts and bruises. When questioned, an interrogator who was at [REDACTED] acknowledged that they used a stiff brush to bathe Al-Nashiri. He described the brush as the kind of brush one uses in a bath to remove stubborn dirt. A CTC manager who had heard of the incident attributed the abrasions on Al-Nashiri’s ankles to an Agency officer accidentally stepping on Al-Nashiri’s shackles while repositioning him into a stress position.”

After the torture in Poland, Al-Nashiri was transferred to Gitmo -- via a flight and brief stint at a secret site in Morocco:

Polish authorities assisted the CIA in secretly transferring the applicant from Poland to Rabat, Morocco, on a rendition plane flight N379P.

It's not just what Poland did to assist, but what it did not do:

There was apparently no attempt by the Polish Government to seek diplomatic assurances from the United States to avert the risk of his being subjected to further torture, incommunicado detention, an unfair trial, or the death penalty when in the US custody.

A 2010 report by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (“the CHRGJ”)found:

N379P’s movements over 3‑7 June 2003 “conform to the most typical attributes of a CIA rendition circuit”. The data collected and examined in the CHRGJ Report shows that a Gulfstream V aircraft, registered with the US Federal Aviation Administration as N379P, embarked from Dulles Airport, Washington D.C. on Tuesday June 3, at 23 h33m GMT and undertook a four-day flight circuit, during which it landed in and departed from six different foreign countries including Germany, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Poland, Morocco and Portugal. The aircraft returned from Portugal back to Dulles Αirport on 7 June 2003 (for further details (see also paragraphs 99-102 below).

Translation:

...the Polish Government granted licences and overflight permissions to facilitate the CIA rendition flight N379P and that the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency (PANSA) (Polska Agencja Żeglugi Powietrznej) officials collaborated with Jeppesen (and, by extension, with Jeppesen’s client, the CIA) by accepting the task of navigating this disguised flight into Szymany. Indeeed, they knowingly issued a permit for Warsaw, despite the fact that they knew that the aircraft was actually going to land in Szymany....

Guantanamo wasn't the end for al-Nashiri. After 6 months at Gitmo, he was flown back to Morocco, and then to a secret site in Romania, where he spent several more months, before being returned to Gitmo.

So did the U.S. get anything of value from al-Nahsiri, or just lies to get them to stop the torture? According to al-Nashiri, he told them whatever they wanted to hear to get the torture to stop.

43. According to a partially redacted transcript of that hearing, the applicant stated that he “[had been] tortured into confession and once he [had] made a confession his captors [had been] happy and they [had] stopped torturing him. He also stated that he had made up stories during the torture in order to get it to stop and that “[f]rom the time I [had been] arrested five years ago, they [had] been torturing me. It [had] happened during interviews. One time they [had] tortured me one way and another time they [had] tortured me in a different way”.

The applicant’s reply to the President of the Tribunal’s request to describe the methods that were used, is largely redacted from the transcript of the hearing. The unredacted portion however states that: “before I was arrested I used to be able to run about ten kilometres. Now, I cannot walk for more than ten minutes. My nerves are swollen in my body”.

He also stated that “they used to drown me in water. So I used to say yes, yes.” Further details relating to his own description of his treatment are redacted from the transcript.

Al-Nashiri's current charges include participation in the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 and the attack on the French civilian oil tanker MV Limburg in the Gulf of Aden in 2002. The U.S. is seeking the death penalty for him. He filed a habeas petition in federal court five years ago in 2008 and it is still pending.

The U.S. dismissed the charge against him after his defense lawyers said they intended to introduce evidence of his torture. But then Congress passed the Military Commission Act of 2009, which changed the rules, so the U.S. refiled the charges before the military commission. On the new rules in the 2009 Act:

...they still provide for the death penalty and retain many of the deficiencies associated with the previous military commission rules.

...The United States Secretary of Defense or his designee acts as the convening authority for a given commission, approves charges for trial by a military commission and selects the commission members who are required to be members of the armed forces on or recalled to active duty, and as such are subordinate to the Secretary of Defense. Military commissions still apply only to non-US citizens. The current rules place no limits on the length of time within which a suspect must be charged or tried. Indeed, they expressly exempt military commissions from speedy trial requirements.

Furthermore, the current military commission rules allow for the accused to be denied access to classified information or evidence and, unlike US federal court procedures which bar the admission of hearsay, they expressly permit hearsay evidence and do not bar convictions based mainly on such evidence.

... Unlike US federal court procedures which bar the admission of evidence derived from coerced statements, the current military commission rules admit evidence derived from coerced statements if that evidence would have been otherwise obtained and the use of such evidence would be consistent with the interests of justice. Moreover, the military commissions will still be held in the remote location of Guantanamo Bay, thereby significantly hindering public access to the proceedings against the applicant.

Finally, there is considerable uncertainty associated with the current military commission rules, which were enacted as recently as October 2009 and have been applied so far in only three cases, none of which involved the death penalty.

Al-Nashiri's alleged co-spirators in the USS Cole bombing were tried in federal court, not at Gitmo.

Human Rights Watch also published a report on the ghost detainees, including al-Nashiri, which confirmed Poland's participation.

Arbitrary incommunicado detention is illegal under international law. It often acts as a foundation for torture and mistreatment of detainees. U.S. government officials, speaking anonymously to journalists in the past, have admitted that some secretly held detainees have been subjected to torture and other mistreatment, including waterboarding (immersing or smothering a detainee with water until he believes he is about to drown). Countries that allow secret detention programs to operate on their territory are complicit in the human rights abuses committed against detainees.

...Under international law, enforced disappearances occur when persons are deprived of their liberty, and the detaining authority refuses to disclose their fate or whereabouts, or refuses to acknowledge their detention, which places the detainees outside the protection of the law. International treaties ratified by the United States prohibit incommunicado detention of persons in secret locations.

Poland did its share of stone-walling investigations into its participation:

69. Mr. Karski also made the following statement, which reflects the position of the Polish Government on the question of CIA renditions:

‘According to the information I have been provided with, none of the questioned flights was recorded in the traffic controlled by our competent authorities – in connection with Szymany or any other Polish airport.’

70. The absence of flight records from a country such as Poland is unusual. A host of neighbouring countries, including Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic have had no such problems in retrieving official data for the period since 2001. Indeed, the submissions of these countries, along with my data from Eurocontrol, confirm numerous flights into and out of Polish airports by the CIA-linked planes that are the subject of this report.

Then there's the 2006 Marty report:

It is inconceivable that certain operations conducted by American services could have taken place without the active participation, or at least the collusion, of national intelligence services. If this were the case, one would be justified in seriously questioning the effectiveness, and therefore the legitimacy, of such services. The main concern of some governments was clearly to avoid disturbing their relationships with the United States, a crucial partner and ally. Other governments apparently work on the assumption that any information learned via their intelligence services is not supposed to be known.”

More from the Marty report:

The CIA brokered ‘operating agreements’ with the Governments of Poland and Romania to hold its High-Value Detainees (HVDs) in secret detention facilities on their respective territories. Poland and Romania agreed to provide the premises in which these facilities were established, the highest degrees of physical security and secrecy, and steadfast guarantees of non-interference.

On why the U.S. chose Poland and Romania:

123. It is interesting to note that the United States chose, in the case of Poland and Romania, to form special partnerships with countries that were economically vulnerable, emerging from difficult transitional periods in their history, and dependent on American support for their strategic development.

How did Poland participate?

170 From our interviews with current and former Polish military intelligence officials, we have established that the WSI’s role in the HVD programme comprised two levels of co-operation. On the first level, military intelligence officers provided extraordinary levels of physical security by setting up temporary or permanent military-style ‘buffer zones’ around the CIA’s detainee transfer and interrogation activities. This approach was deployed most notably to protect the CIA’s movements to and from, as well as its activities within, the military training base at Stare Kiejkuty. Classified documents, the existence of which was made known to our team describe how WSI agents performed these security role under the guise of a Polish Army Unit (Jednostka Wojskowa) denoted by the code JW-2669, which was the formal occupant of the Stare Kiejkuty facility.

171 On the second level, the WSI’s assistance depended to a large extent on its covert penetration of other state and parastatal institutions through its collaboration with undercover ‘functionaries’ in their ranks. Our sources have indicated to us that WSI collaborators were present within institutions including the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency (Polska Agencja Żeglugi Powietrznej), where they assisted m disguising the existence and exact movements of incoming CIA flights; the Polish Border Guard (Straż Graniczna), where they ensured that normal procedures for incoming foreign passengers were not strictly applied when those CIA flights landed; and the national Customs Office (Główny Urząd Celny), where they resolved irregularities in the non-payment of fees related to CIA operations Thus the military intelligence partnership brought with it influence throughout a society-wide undercover community, none of which was checked by the conventional civilian oversight mechanisms.”

Who in Poland might be accountable? The Marty report found:

...the President of the Republic of Poland, Aleksander KWAŚNIEWSKI, the Chief of the National Security Bureau (also Secretary of National Security Committee), Marek SIWIEC, the Minister of National Defence (Ministerial oversight of Military Intelligence), Jerzy SZMAJDZINSKI, and the Head of Military Intelligence, Marek DUKACZEWSKI.

...There was complete consensus on the part of our key senior sources that President Kwasniewski was the foremost national authority on the HVD programme. One military intelligence source told us: ‘Listen, Poland agreed from the top down... From the President - yes... to provide the CIA all it needed.’ Asked whether the Prime Minister and his Cabinet were briefed on the HVD programme, our source said: ‘Even the ABW [Internal Security Agency] and AW [Foreign Intelligence Agency] do not have access to all of our classified materials. Forget the Prime Minister it operated directly under the President’.

More confirmation:

At least ten flights by at least four different aircraft serviced the CIA’s secret detention programme in Poland between 2002 and 2005. At least six of them arrived directly from Kabul, Afghanistan during precisely the period in which our sources have told us that High-Value Detainees (HVDs) were being transferred to Poland. Each of these flights landed at the same airport I named in my 2006 report as a detainee drop-off point - Szymany.

Others potentially liable:

The Polish Air Navigation Services Agency (Polska Agencja Żeglugi Powietrznej), commonly known as PANSA, also played a crucial role in this systematic cover-up PANSA’s Air Traffic Control in Warsaw navigated all of these flights through Polish airspace, exercising control over the aircraft through each of its flight phases right up to the last phase, when control was handed over to the authority supervising the airfield at Szymany, immediately before the aircraft’s landing PANSA navigated the aircraft m the majority of these cases without a legitimate and complete flight plan having been filed for the route flown.

It wasn't just al-Nashiri. Other detainees subjected to extraordinary rendition to the black hole sites include Bisher Al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna, Abou Elkassim Britel, Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohammed. There were at least 14 of them.

The Statement of Facts cites the 2007 International Red Cross report which found:

Throughout the entire period during which they were held in the CIA detention program – which ranged from sixteen months up to almost four and a half years and which, for eleven of the fourteen was over three years – the detainees were kept in continuous solitary confinement and incommunicado detention. They had no knowledge of where they were being held, no contact with persons other than their interrogators or guards. Even their guards were usually masked and, other than the absolute minimum, did not communicate in any way with the detainees. None had any real – let alone regular – contact with other persons detained, other than occasionally for the purposes of inquiry when they were confronted with another detainee. None had any contact with legal representation. The fourteen had no access to news from the outside world, apart from in the later stages of their detention when some of them occasionally received printouts of sports news from the internet and one reported receiving newspapers.

None of the fourteen had any contact with their families, either in written form or through family visits or telephone calls. They were therefore unable to inform their families of their fate. As such, the fourteen had become missing persons. In any context, such a situation, given its prolonged duration, is clearly a cause of extreme distress for both the detainees and families concerned and itself constitutes a form of ill-treatment.

In addition, the detainees were denied access to an independent third party. In order to ensure accountability, there is a need for a procedure of notification to families, and of notification and access to detained persons, under defined modalities, for a third party, such as the ICRC. That this was not practiced, to the knowledge of the ICRC, neither for the fourteen nor for any other detainee who passed through the CIA detention program, is a matter of serious concern.

The IRC report also summed up the physical abuse -- it's too long to reprint here.

The Statement of Facts concludes with 13 ways Poland could be found liable.

The case is AL NASHIRI v. POLAND. Al Nashiri is represented by J.A. Goldston, R. Skilbeck, A. Singh and Nancy Hollander. Al Nashiri also has a case pending against Romania.

This article on the current hearing contains this response by former Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski.

"Of course, everything took place with my knowledge,” former President Aleksander Kwaśniewski said. “The decision to cooperate with the CIA carried a risk, that Americans would use unacceptable methods. But if a CIA agent brutally treated a prisoner in a Marriott hotel in Warsaw, would you charge the directors of that hotel for the actions of that agent?"

...The court will issue a judgement on the culpability of Mr. Kwaśniewski’s “hotel” next year.

So what is an appropriate penalty for those involved in Hotel Stare Kiejkuty in Szymany, Poland? Maybe the authorizing (and/or willfully blind) officials (and ours,including Bush, Cheney and Yoo) should be imprisoned for life in solitary confinement at a facility like Gitmo, and forced to be undergo enhanced interrogation techniques once a month for three days until they admit they knew they were subjecting these men to torture in violation of domestic and international law. If they ever retract their confession, the EIT period will be increased to twice a month, so they learn, like Pavlov's dog, not to retract it again. And three times a day, every day, upon awakening, before dinner and before bedtime, the refrain from Hotel California will be blared into their cells: "You can check out any time you like but you can never leave."