To many wealthy Lithuanians, it was just a fancy horseback riding academy. But horses aren't the only things kept in the barn: the CIA had built a secret prison there, where they interrogated (or tortured, your choice of word) suspected al-Qaeda terrorists.
ABC News has the story:
The CIA constructed the prison over the next several months, apparently flying in prefabricated elements from outside Lithuania. The prison opened in Sept. 2004.
According to sources who saw the facility, the riding academy originally consisted of an indoor riding area with a red metallic roof, a stable and a cafe. The CIA built a thick concrete wall inside the riding area. Behind the wall, it built what one Lithuanian source called a "building within a building."
On a series of thick concrete pads, it installed what a source called "prefabricated pods" to house prisoners, each separated from the other by five or six feet. Each pod included a shower, a bed and a toilet. Separate cells were constructed for interrogations.
Yes, we could do it, but it wouldn't be easy. We would need (over the course of 6 years) to oust every member of congress, and elect people who are intelligent, far-sighted, honest, and able to stand up to tremendous lobbying pressure. We would need the cooperation of a very large, ignorant fraction of the population to get a whole lot smarter and more interested in the wider world.
It should be easy, but so should solving most of the rest of our problems (poverty; global warming; access to education, water and food; and whatnot). All the legal, technological, and scientific solutions exist, but people are irrational (in ways sometimes good, sometimes bad) and fallible, and that holds everything up.