Wow!

Lithuania’s foreign minister steps down
By Andrew Ward in London

Published: January 22 2010 01:39 | Last updated: January 22 2010 01:39

Lithuania’s foreign minister resigned on Thursday amid a dispute over the Baltic country’s hosting of secret CIA prisons that may have been used to interrogate terror suspects.

Vygaudas Usackas, foreign minister, had continued to insist that no prisoners were held on Lithuanian soil even after a parliamentary investigation concluded last month that two CIA facilities were set up by the staunch US ally.

This put him at odds with Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite, who has led the push for investigations into the prisons and made clear that she believes people were detained.

The parliamentary probe found that Lithuania’s national security agency helped the US intelligence service set up two secret facilities and a logistics system in the country between 2002 and 2006 but found no firm evidence that prisoners were held.

The report made Lithuania the first country to officially acknowledge hosting clandestine CIA prisons after the September 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Former US president George W. Bush admitted in 2006 that the CIA had operated prisons abroad in a move that critics said was designed to allow interrogations to take place out of reach of US laws.

Poland and Romania have denied allegations that they were also among the countries involved.

Ms Grybauskaite, who was elected president last year, has called for Lithuania to “clean up, take responsibility, apologise and promise this will never happen again”.

She publicly rebuked Mr Usackas over his more circumspect attitude towards the prisons and the pair also clashed over policy towards neighbouring Belarus and other issues. “Considering the present situation I am announcing my resignation,” he told reporters on Thursday.

A foreign ministry official said the CIA prison issue was just one of several reasons for Mr Usackas’s decision to quit. Andrius Kubilius, Lithuanian prime minister, was still mulling the minister’s resignation offer on Thursday night but officials said he was expected to accept it.

The departure would come just over a month after the head of Lithuania’s domestic intelligence agency resigned in connection with the prison controversy.

The parliamentary investigation established that several aircraft linked to the CIA landed in Lithuania between 2003 and 2006 and that local customs authorities were barred from inspecting them.

The probe concluded that the potential existed for prisoners to be held in Lithuania but fell short of conclusive proof that they had been.

Lithuania’s political leadership was largely absolved of responsibility in the report, which said the security services did not inform top government officials of the scheme.

Andrius Kubilius, Lithuanian prime minister, said last month that the report was “deeply worrying”, warning that the country’s “strategic partnership” with the US could not be used as an excuse for “Soviet methods”.
.Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.