Romania's secret CIA prison: Two decades of denial and unanswered questions - Middle East Eye

Ammar al-Baluchi remembers the cold most of all.

Held nearly naked in a cell lit around the clock by fluorescent bulbs, he referred to his detention "as if I was living in a refrigerator".

The nephew of self-declared 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Baluchi was one of six to a dozen men believed to be held and tortured in a secret CIA prison in Bucharest between 2003 and 2005.

The treatment of detainees at the facility, formally known as "Detention Site Black", is described in detail in Guantanamo court filings. 

Solitary confinement under lights that never switched off, sleep deprivation that at times meant being forced to stand shackled for days, repeated dousing with icy water, and forced shaving and physical handling that interrogators euphemistically logged as "attention grasps" and "facial holds" were common practice.

A photo released by Baluchi's lawyers to the press in 2024 shows him stripped naked and photographed. It is believed to be the first published image - of tens of thousands - of a "war on terror" detainee in a CIA black site.

"We know they were tortured horrifically," Ben Keith, a British barrister representing Baluchi outside the US, told Middle East Eye.

"It's not always possible to say which bit of torture took place because they were tortured for days and weeks, but you don’t detain somebody in a black site with the purpose of just talking to them."

A quarter-century after the 9/11 attacks, which triggered the so-called "war on terror" and devastating US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that directly killed at least 940,000 people, a US military judge has finally set a trial date for Baluchi: 5 June 2028.

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama ruled this month that the case against Mohammed, Baluchi, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi will begin on that date.

Schrama is the fifth military judge to preside over a case that has been trapped for more than a decade in disputes over evidence, national security secrecy and, above all, whether confessions obtained under torture before the men ever reached Guantanamo can be used at trial.

That question runs directly through a basement in Bucharest, where the accused are believed to have been detained and tortured.

In April 2025, a Guantanamo military judge ruled that statements Baluchi gave the FBI in 2007 were involuntary and inadmissible, tainted by what the court called torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment inflicted on him in CIA custody, including in Romania.

The judge found that Guantanamo's "modestly changed confinement circumstances" had not been enough to remove the “lingering taint” of what happened before he arrived there.

The Romanian site was part of a network of secret prisons the CIA ran across three continents in the years after 9/11 - in Thailand, Poland, Lithuania and Romania - as part of a rendition, detention and interrogation programme that was formally shut down in 2009.

Romania's site opened in the autumn of 2003, according to court documents and NGO reports reviewed by MEE. 

According to a 2019 report by the Rendition Project, the CIA struck its agreement with Romanian authorities to host a black site in mid-October 2002.

By January 2003, the CIA's Bucharest station was already discussing how to show Romania that "we deeply appreciate the cooperation and support". 

That appreciation had a price: $8m, followed by "millions more", according to the same Rendition Project report. By autumn, the first batch of five prisoners had arrived.

The late Romanian president Ion Iliescu confirmed the outlines of the arrangement in a 2015 interview with Der Spiegel, describing a request that came "around the turn of the year 2002, 2003" from "our US allies" who asked Romania "for a site".

He said he approved it in principle as "a gesture of courtesy ahead of our accession to Nato", and that he deliberately did not ask for details.

"We did not interfere with the activities of the USA on this site," he said. "This request seemed like a minor issue to me as the head of state."

The details, Iliescu said, were handled by Ioan Talpes, his national security adviser then. 

Talpes could not be reached for comment but gave a candid account to Der Spiegel in a 2014 interview, saying he discussed "a more intense cooperation" with the CIA from 2003 and understood that it involved detaining people at "one or two locations in Romania".

He admitted to personally approving the leasing of a government building to the American intelligence agency.

Talpes put it more bluntly in Romanian media, saying his country "did not have the interest to know what the Americans were doing" at the site it provided, to prove to Washington that Romania could be trusted.

Crofton Black, a former investigator with the Rendition Project who spent close to a decade tracing the CIA’s rendition network through flight logs and declassified documents, told MEE that he thinks Romania "made the decision [to host the black site] because it was in their interest, and thought the US would cover for them".

Swiss Senator Dick Marty, whose 2007 report to the Council of Europe was one of the earliest and most detailed independent reconstructions of the CIA's black-site network, concluded that while "very few people" in the countries involved likely knew the centres existed, "the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories".

His report named Romania and Poland specifically as having hosted secret CIA detention facilities.

The Council of Europe's list of Romanians who knew, according to Marty and later research by the Rendition Project, extends beyond Iliescu and Talpeş to a few other officials, including Traian Basescu, who succeeded Iliescu as president in 2004. 

MEE reached out to Basescu for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

The 2019 report adds a detail Marty did not fully spell out. 

After September 2004, Romanian officials were formally briefed by the US ambassador and the CIA's Bucharest station chief on the programme, in a presentation that "clearly described" the use of torture.

"It's definitively the case - the allegations of torture, the money, the people who were held there - it's definitively the case that that’s Romania in the court files," said Black, who co-authored the Rendition Project report.

Unlike the black sites in Lithuania and Poland, which are believed to have been in more remote locations, Romania's site is believed to have been located in central Bucharest.

An AP and ARD Panorama investigation in 2011 narrowed down the location of the site in Bucharest to the government building of the country's National Registry Office for Classified Information, also known as Orniss, on a quiet, leafy street in northern Bucharest close to a set of train tracks.

Orniss "categorically denied" speculation that there had been a CIA prison on the premises, telling MEE that it rejected any association between the institution and "the so-called CIA detention centres".

While the site's location is disputed, concurring testimonies in court records reveal details of the conditions inside it.

The site consisted of six prefabricated cells painted white and tiled with impact-resistant glass, while the cells themselves were mounted on springs, engineered to keep detainees slightly off balance and disoriented. 

The site is sometimes referred to as "Bright Light" because of the fluorescent, continuous light inside.

Another detainee held there was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of being the mastermind of the 12  October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. He is believed to have been held in Romania between April 2004 and November 2005.

His case reached the European Court of Human Rights, which later found in a landmark 2018 ruling that his detention in Romania involved an "extremely harsh" regime, including blindfolding, total isolation, exposure to loud noise and unbroken light, and leg shackles during every movement. The Court and related records also document sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, slapping and, at one point, forced rectal feeding.

A 2014 US Senate Intelligence Committee report found that the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" programme in the black sites did not produce unique, life-saving intelligence that could not have been obtained by other means.

A US Senate report on CIA torture revealed that the CIA held at least 119 detainees in its secret detention programme, with at least 39 of them subjected to the agency's "enhanced interrogation techniques," often without proper authorisation.

The CIA also misled oversight bodies and the public about the programme’s brutality, while there was little accountability for the abuses.

For two decades, Romania's official position has been one of denial.

The country's foreign intelligence service replied to an MEE inquiry that "the matters had already been thoroughly examined by the competent judicial authorities, both nationally and within international bodies" and that it could not comment further.

Despite that, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2018 that Romania had violated Nashiri's rights, including by allowing his torture, both through what happened to him and through the state’s failure to properly investigate it.

The Court found that a secret detention centre had operated in Romania and that Romanian authorities had "cooperated in the preparation and execution" of the CIA's rendition and detention programme, fully aware of its nature and purpose even if they were not privy to everything that happened inside.

Romania responded by closing the domestic criminal investigation.

A case opened in 2012 after a complaint from Nashiri's lawyers, represented by the Open Society Justice Initiative, had by 2014 been formally classified as an inquiry into unlawful deprivation of liberty and torture.

Lawyers who represented Nashiri in Strasbourg and Romania did not agree to interview requests before publication.

But according to a Romanian parliamentary question answered by the foreign ministry in 2018, the Open Society complaint originally filed sought far more than charges of torture and unlawful detention. It asked prosecutors to investigate complicity in murder, unlawful arrest, abuse of office, and failure to report a crime, among other allegations.

Prosecutors narrowed that down in 2014 to two counts: unlawful deprivation of liberty and torture.

The investigation went nowhere. In any case, by 2016, the statute of limitations on the alleged crimes had already expired because no investigative steps had been taken that would have suspended the clock, and no suspect had ever been formally identified.

Romania's public prosecutor's office told MEE in an official response that the file was closed in March 2021, with the perpetrator classified as "unknown" despite what it described as the use of international cooperation mechanisms to gather evidence.

The same year, the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers expressed "profound regret" that Romania could not show it had used all possible means to establish the facts, three years after the Strasbourg ruling required it to.

Keith, Baluchi's counsel, said senior Romanian officials acted with direct intent in 2003 and 2004 to allow the CIA to detain, torture and later transfer Baluchi to Lithuania.

"We know from the ruling in al-Nashiri the Romanians knew about it; they might have not known exactly what was happening, but they facilitated the CIA to create a black site to torture these men," Keith said.

"Our contention is that Romania not only facilitated the CIA black site but knew they were being used to torture individuals."

MEE reached out to Romania's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Justice for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

Romania's domestic intelligence service, SRI, also declined to comment, telling MEE that it lacked legal standing to address claims "circulating in the public space".

With a trial date now set for June 2028, the confessions extracted under torture at CIA "black sites" – including the facility in Bucharest – have become central to the 9/11 case.

So, too, has the role of the governments that allowed the CIA to operate these secret detention and interrogation sites on their territory.

Romania, for its part, is still refusing to talk about what happened in its basement, despite the body of evidence that has emerged.

"There's been years of compelling evidence that Romania hosted a black sit,  and the more it has grown, the government continued to deny it was involved," said Black.