Poland's prime minister has ordered an investigation into whether the CIA ran secret jails for terrorist suspects there, saying the issue must be cleared up before it becomes "dangerous" for his country.
Mr Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz made the announcement yesterday, a day after a military analyst for a prominent rights group insisted Poland was a central CIA detention centre. Poland's army chief denied the allegations, while Washington maintained its policy of not confirming the existence of any prisons.
"I'm not going to get into the right of a sovereign country to conduct an investigation on its own territory," said Frederick Jones, spokesman for the White House's National Security Council.
Mr Marcinkiewicz said he was "commissioning a detailed check in all places possible, to precisely check if there is any proof that such an event took place in our country."
More than a half-dozen investigations are under way into whether European countries may have hosted secret US-run prisons in which prisoners were tortured, and whether European airports and airspace were used for alleged CIA flights transporting prisoners to countries where torture is practised.
Polish officials have consistently denied the existence of such jails.
However, Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in remarks published on Friday that Poland was the chief CIA detention site in Europe, part of a system of clandestine prisons for interrogating al-Qaeda suspects.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asserted during her recent trip to Europe that the US acts within the law, and argued that Europeans were safer because of tough US tactics. However, she refused to discuss intelligence operations and address some of the lingering questions about the alleged CIA detention centres.