Report Gives Details on CIA Prisons

The report said the NATO-oriented arrangement was particularly effective with two of the alliance's newest members, Poland and Romania, which were eager to assist the United States and strengthen their ties with Washington.

A facility at Poland's Stare Kiejkuty intelligence training base was used to detain and interrogate the most important CIA suspects, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, a suspected senior al-Qaeda operative, the report said. By its account, both men were "held and questioned using 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' " described in the report as a euphemism for torture.

The report said that based on flight documents and information provided by intelligence sources, "it is likely" that Mohammed, who was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on March 1, 2003, was transferred to Kabul, then flown on March 7 to the Szymany military airport in Poland.

Sources told investigators that when a CIA flight approached the Szymany airfield, Polish operatives would order all Polish personnel to leave the area of the runway. An American "landing team" usually waited at the end of the runway "in two or three vans with their engines often running."

When the aircraft came to a stop, the vans would race toward the plane. American officials would board the craft, then hustle the detainee into one of the vans, usually out of the line of sight of the Polish control tower.

The vans would then speed through the airport's front security gates, using high beams that blinded Polish guards, then drive down a paved road "lined by thick pine forests on both sides" and follow an unpaved road along a lake, eventually reaching the entrance to the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence training base, where prisoners were held and questioned, the report said.

The report went on to describe conditions in the CIA secret detention cells, based on interviews with "former or current detainees, human rights advocates, or people who have worked in the establishment or operations of CIA secret prisons." The report said the descriptions were not based on a single prisoner or cell, but on a compilation of accounts. It did not specify which country's prison was being described.

According to those accounts, detainees were often kept naked in their cells for several weeks and endured up to four consecutive months of "solitary confinement and extreme sensory deprivation in cramped cells, shackled and handcuffed at all times." Temperatures in the cells were often kept at extreme levels: "sometimes so hot one would gasp for breath, sometimes freezing cold."

The Council of Europe is Europe's official human rights watchdog. It has limited power to enforce human rights regulations.

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.