Decades after the 9/11 attacks launched the United States’ global “war on terror”, newly declassified court filings and confirmed evidence have pulled back the curtain on one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most secretive overseas black sites: a downtown Bucharest detention facility where scores of detainees were held and systematically tortured between 2003 and 2005. Among the men held at the site, codenamed Detention Site Black, is Ammar al-Baluchi, nephew of self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose firsthand account of cruelty paints a damning portrait of life inside the secret prison.
Baluchi, who was detained at the facility for nearly two years, says the most searing memory of his captivity is the unrelenting cold. Held nearly naked in cells illuminated 24 hours a day by harsh fluorescent bulbs, he described his imprisonment as “living inside a refrigerator”. Court documents detail a consistent pattern of abuse at the site: prolonged solitary confinement under constant artificial light, deliberate sleep deprivation that sometimes kept detainees shackled in a standing position for days on end, repeated dousing with ice-cold water, and degrading forced procedures that interrogators labeled with euphemisms such as “attention grasps” and “facial holds”. Earlier this year, Baluchi’s legal team released the first ever publicly circulated photograph of a CIA black site detainee: an image of Baluchi stripped naked and photographed by intelligence personnel, one of tens of thousands of similar images secretly held by the U.S. government.
More than 23 years after the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and prompted the U.S. to launch deadly invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that have killed at least 940,000 people directly, a U.S. military judge has finally scheduled a long-delayed trial for Baluchi and four other co-defendants in the 9/11 case. Proceedings are set to open on June 5, 2028, more than a decade after the case was first brought. The decades-long delay stems from a core legal dispute: whether confessions and statements coerced through torture at CIA black sites before the detainees were transferred to Guantanamo Bay can be used as admissible evidence in court. In a landmark 2025 ruling, a Guantanamo military judge found that statements Baluchi gave to the FBI in 2007 were involuntary and inadmissible, ruling they were permanently tainted by the torture and cruel, inhuman treatment he endured in CIA custody, including at the Bucharest site. The judge ruled that even the slightly improved conditions of detention at Guantanamo could not erase the “lingering taint” of abuse he suffered in the black site network.
The Bucharest black site was part of a sprawling network of secret CIA prisons spread across three continents in the years after 9/11, part of the agency’s controversial rendition, detention and interrogation program that was formally shut down by the Obama administration in 2009. Declassified records and independent research from the Rendition Project, an NGO that has spent years tracking the CIA’s secret detention network, reveal that Romanian senior state officials agreed to host the site as a goodwill gesture ahead of Romania’s 2004 accession to NATO, in exchange for a total payment of at least $8 million plus additional millions in ongoing funding.
The agreement to build the site was finalized in mid-October 2002, and the first group of five detainees arrived at the facility in autumn 2003. Former Romanian president Ion Iliescu confirmed the broad outlines of the deal in a 2015 interview, acknowledging that U.S. allies requested a site for detention operations “around the turn of the year 2002 and 2003”, which he approved in principle without asking for details. “We did not interfere with the activities of the USA on this site,” Iliescu said, framing the decision as “a gesture of courtesy ahead of our accession to Nato”. The deal was handled by then-national security advisor Ioan Talpes, who admitted in a 2014 interview that he personally approved the lease of a government-owned building to the CIA, and that Romanian officials deliberately chose not to investigate what the agency was doing at the site in order to prove Romania’s reliability to Washington.
Independent investigators have confirmed that top Romanian officials, including former president Traian Basescu, who took office in 2004, were fully aware of the site’s existence and purpose. A 2019 Rendition Project report added a previously undisclosed detail: after September 2004, senior U.S. diplomats and CIA officials formally briefed Romanian authorities on the full scope of the program, including clear descriptions of the torture techniques used on detainees. “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 Crofton Black, a former Rendition Project investigator who spent nearly a decade tracing the black site network through flight logs and declassified documents. Black told reporters that Romania made the deliberate choice to host the site because it aligned with the country’s geopolitical goals, and officials believed the U.S. would shield them from accountability.
Unlike black sites in Poland and Lithuania that were built in remote, isolated areas, Detention Site Black was located in central Bucharest, in a government building housing the National Registry Office for Classified Information (Orniss) on a quiet residential street in northern Bucharest, according to a 2011 joint investigation by the Associated Press and ARD Panorama. Orniss has “categorically denied” any connection to the prison. Despite disputes over the exact location, overlapping court testimonies from multiple detainees confirm consistent details of the facility’s harsh conditions: six prefabricated, white-painted cells tiled with impact-resistant glass, mounted on springs designed to keep detainees constantly off-balance and disoriented, with unbroken fluorescent lighting that gave the site the unofficial nickname “Bright Light”.
Another high-profile detainee held at Detention Site Black is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the accused mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Nashiri was held at the Bucharest site between April 2004 and November 2005, and his case reached the European Court of Human Rights, which issued a landmark 2018 ruling that found Romania had violated international human rights law by enabling the CIA’s torture program. The court confirmed Nashiri endured “extremely harsh” conditions including permanent blindfolding, total solitary confinement, constant exposure to loud noise and unbroken lighting, permanent leg shackles during movement, sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, physical assault, and forced rectal feeding.
A 2014 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report confirmed what independent investigators have long alleged: the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program never produced unique, life-saving intelligence that could not have been obtained through legal interrogation methods. The report found that the CIA held at least 119 detainees across the black site network, 39 of whom were subjected to the brutal unauthorized interrogation techniques, and that the agency deliberately misled Congress and the public about the program’s brutality. To date, almost no U.S. or foreign officials have faced criminal accountability for the abuses.
For more than two decades, successive Romanian governments have officially denied any involvement in hosting the black site. When contacted by Middle East Eye for this report, the Romanian foreign intelligence service said the matter had already been fully investigated by national and international judicial bodies and declined further comment. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Justice and former president Basescu did not respond to requests for comment, while the domestic intelligence service SRI said it lacked legal standing to address public claims about the site.
Despite Romania’s official denial, the 2018 European Court of Human Rights ruling formally confirmed that the country violated Nashiri’s human rights by enabling his torture and failing to launch a credible investigation into the abuses. A domestic criminal investigation into the allegations, opened in 2012 after a complaint from Nashiri’s legal team, was deliberately stalled for years, and by 2016 the statute of limitations for all alleged crimes had expired, with no suspects ever formally identified. The case was officially closed in March 2021, with prosecutors labeling the perpetrator “unknown” despite access to international evidence sharing. In 2021, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers expressed “profound regret” that Romania had failed to use all available means to investigate and establish the full facts of the case, as required by the Strasbourg court ruling.
Ben Keith, a British barrister who represents Baluchi outside the U.S., said senior Romanian officials intentionally enabled the CIA’s torture program. “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.”
With the 9/11 trial now scheduled for 2028, the role of Romania and other host countries in the CIA’s black site network, and the torture inflicted at Detention Site Black, will take center stage in the legal proceedings. For independent investigators, Romania’s ongoing refusal to acknowledge its role despite overwhelming evidence is indefensible. “There’s been years of compelling evidence that Romania hosted a black site, and the more the evidence has grown, the government continued to deny it was involved,” Black said. “It’s ridiculous, it’s nonsense.”
