Gdansk outraged by 'CIA black site' movie slur

Gdansk: photo - wikipedia

“This is disgraceful. Everyone in Gdansk is annoyed,” mayor Pawel Adamowicz told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily, following the release of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty.

Bigelow depicts Gdansk as a setting for the torture of terrorist suspects in the movie.

A shot of the city's docks – famed for their association with the Solidarity movement – is accompanied by a tag-line that reads “CIA Black Site, Gdansk, Poland,” so that viewers are in no doubt about where the action is supposed to be taking place.

Meanwhile, Poland is continuing to wrestle with accusations that such a facility did exist between 2002-2003, albeit not in the Gdansk region, but at a military base in Stare Kiejkuty, north east Poland.

Last week, the European Court of Human Rights' announced that it was declassifying documents on the alleged existence of a CIA prison in Poland.

Mikolaj Pietrzak, lawyer for Saudi terrorist suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, filed a complaint to the court in May 2011 claiming he was detained in a CIA jail in Poland.

Polish prosecutors have repeatedly delayed publication of their own investigation into the matter, calling for a further extension last month.

In relation to the Hollywood version of events, the city of Gdansk has released a statement on its web site gdansk.pl, stressing that the Zero Dark Thirty “is not a documentary film.

“Gdansk authorities do not have any information that could confirm that a similar scenario to the one in the film could have also occurred in real life,” the city stressed.

“We hope that Gdansk – in spite of its accidental role in Kathryn Bigelow's film as a negative place - will continue to be associated throughout the world as above all a site of Freedom and Solidarity.” (nh)