Jordan's Spy Agency: Holding Cell (torture chambers) for the CIA,served as covert way station for p

Jordan's Spy Agency: Holding Cell for the CIA

By Craig Whitlock The Washington Post

Saturday 01 December 2007 Foreign terror suspects tell of torture.

Amman, Jordan - Over the past seven years, an imposing building on the outskirts of

this city has served as a secret holding cell for the CIA.

The building is the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan's

powerful spy and security agency. Since 2000, at the CIA's behest, at least 12 non-Jordanian

terrorism suspects have been detained and interrogated here, according to documents and

former prisoners, human rights advocates, defense lawyers and former U.S. officials.

In most of the cases, the spy center served as a covert way station for CIA prisoners

captured in other countries. It was a place where they could be hidden after being arrested

and kept for a few days or several months before being moved on to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or

CIA prisons elsewhere in the world.

Others were arrested while transiting through Jordan, including two detained during

stopovers at Amman's international airport. Another prisoner, a microbiology student

captured in Pakistan in the weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has not been seen

since he was flown to Amman on a CIA plane six years ago.

The most recent case to come to light involved a Palestinian detainee, Marwan

al-Jabour, who was transferred to Jordan last year from a CIA-run secret prison, then

released several weeks later in the Gaza Strip.

The General Intelligence Department, or GID, is perhaps the CIA's most trusted partner

in the Arab world. The Jordanian agency has received money, training and equipment from the

CIA for decades and even has a public English-language Web site. The relationship has

deepened in recent years, with U.S. officials praising their Jordanian counterparts for the

depth of their knowledge regarding al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic networks.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, however, the GID was attractive for another reason,

according to former U.S. counterterrorism officials and Jordanian human rights advocates.

Its interrogators had a reputation for persuading tight-lipped suspects to talk, even if

that meant using abusive tactics that could violate U.S. or international law.

"I was kidnapped, not knowing anything of my fate, with continuous torture and

interrogation for the whole of two years," Al-Haj Abdu Ali Sharqawi, a Guantanamo prisoner

from Yemen, recounted in a written account of his experiences in Jordanian custody. "When I

told them the truth, I was tortured and beaten."

Sharqawi was captured in Karachi, Pakistan, in February 2002 in a joint Pakistani-U.S.

operation. Although the Guantanamo Bay prison had just opened, the CIA flew him instead to

Amman, where he was imprisoned for 19 months, according to his account and flight records.

He was later taken to another CIA-run secret prison, his statement says, before he was

finally moved to Guantanamo in February 2004.

Sharqawi said he was threatened with sexual abuse and electrocution while in Jordan. He

also said he was hidden from officials of the International Committee for the Red Cross

during their visits to inspect Jordanian prisons.

"I was told that if I wanted to leave with permanent disability both mental and

physical, that that could be arranged," Sharqawi said in his April 2006 statement, which was

released by a London-based attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, who represents Guantanamo

inmates. "They said they had all the facilities of Jordan to achieve that. I was told that I

had to talk, I had to tell them everything."

Bush administration officials have said they do not hand over terrorism suspects to

countries that are likely to abuse them. For several years, however, the State Department

has cited widespread allegations of torture by Jordan's security agencies in its annual

report cards on human rights.

Independent monitors have become increasingly critical of Jordan's record. Since 2006,

the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued reports on

abuses in Jordan, often singling out the General Intelligence Department.

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in

particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and

then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and

farruj, or the "grilled chicken," in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung

upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten.

In a report released in January 2007, Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator for

torture, found that "the practice of torture is routine" at GID headquarters and concluded

"that there is total impunity for torture and ill-treatment in the country."

Officials with the GID did not respond to a letter seeking an interview for this

article. The Jordanian Foreign Ministry also did not respond to interview requests.

The CIA declined to comment on its relationship with the GID but defended in general

the covert transfer of terrorism suspects to other countries, a practice known as rendition.

"The United States does not transfer individuals to any country if it believes they

will be tortured there," said Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman. "Setting aside the myths,

rendition is, in fact, a lawful, effective tool that has been used over the years on a very

limited scale, and is designed to take terrorists off the street."

"In Jordan, Nobody Asks"

Immediately after Sept. 11, the CIA had nowhere to hold terrorism suspects it had

captured abroad. The military prison at Guantanamo did not open until January 2002. And it

took the CIA until the spring of 2002 to get its own network of secret overseas prisons up

and running.

Short on options, the CIA sought help from its counterparts in Jordan. Soon, CIA

airplanes began carrying prisoners to Amman.

Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiology student, was captured in a

U.S.-Pakistani operation in Karachi a few weeks after 9/11 on suspicion of helping to

finance al-Qaeda operations. Witnesses reported seeing masked men take him aboard a

Gulfstream V jet at the Karachi airport Oct. 24, 2001.

Records show that the plane was chartered by a CIA front company and that it flew

directly to Amman. Mohammed has not been seen since. Amnesty International said it has asked

the Jordanian government for information on his whereabouts but has not received an answer.

About the same time, Jamal Alawi Mari, another Yemeni citizen, was apprehended at his

home in Karachi by Pakistani and U.S. agents. Records show that U.S. officials suspected him

of working for Islamic charities that allegedly supported al-Qaeda.

Soon after, Mari was also flown by the CIA to Amman. "They never told me where I was

going," he testified later before a U.S. military tribunal. "I found out later I was in Jordan."

Mari said he was imprisoned for four months in Jordan, out of sight of visiting Red

Cross officials. In early 2002, he was taken to Guantanamo and remains imprisoned there.

Defense lawyers and human rights advocates in Amman said it wasn't a surprise that the

CIA turned to Jordan's security agency for assistance.

"In America, people will ask about any breach of the law," said Younis Arab, a lawyer

who has represented a CIA prisoner brought to Jordan. "Here in Jordan, nobody asks. So the

Americans get the Jordanians to do the dirty work."

Other Jordanian lawyers cited unconfirmed reports that the CIA had transferred

high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders to Jordan for interrogation. Although hard evidence is

elusive, some former inmates have reported being detained in the same wing as Ramzi

Binalshibh, a key planner in the Hamburg cell that carried out the Sept. 11 hijackings, said

Abdulkareem al-Shureidah, an Amman lawyer.

"He was detained in Jordanian jails, definitely," Shureidah said of Binalshibh, who was

kept in CIA custody in undisclosed locations from the time of his capture in Karachi in

September 2002 until September 2006, when he was transferred to Guantanamo. "The U.S.

brought all kinds of persons here from around the world."

Samieh Khreis, an Amman lawyer who has represented former Guantanamo inmates from

Jordan, said testimony by former prisoners and others in Jordan reinforced a long-held

suspicion that the CIA ran a satellite operation inside headquarters of the General

Intelligence Department.

"Of course they had a jail here, a secret jail - of course, no question," he said. "If

they were to put me in that GID building over there, in my mind, it might as well be an

American jail."

Khreis said the Jordanian spy service has a well-deserved reputation for using dubious

tactics to force confessions. But he said the CIA sent prisoners to Amman primarily to take

advantage of the GID's knowledge of Islamic radical groups.

"Torture is not the main reason," he said.

A Flat Denial

On June 26, 2006, just after 6 p.m., Nowak, the U.N. investigator, paid a surprise

visit to GID headquarters in Amman.

The Jordanian government had previously agreed to give Nowak carte blanche to inspect

any prison in the country, with no preconditions and unfettered access to inmates. As a new

member of the U.N. Human Rights Council, Jordan was eager to win Nowak's seal of approval.

GID officials permitted Nowak to tour its prison wing. But they refused to allow him to

speak with prisoners in private. When Nowak asked about allegations that the CIA had used

the building as a proxy jail, department officials said the reports were untrue.

"The response was just very flat, a simple denial, 'We don't know anything about that,'

" Nowak recalled in an interview.

In interviews with former GID prisoners, Nowak said, he heard repeated, credible

reports of inmates being subjected to electric shocks, sleep deprivation and various forms

of beatings, including farruj and falaqa.

He said several inmates reported that their chief tormentor was Col. Ali Birjak, head

of the GID's counterterrorism unit and one of the officials who had denied cooperating with

the CIA. Based on those interviews, Nowak recommended in his report that Birjak be

investigated by Jordanian authorities on torture charges.

In a written response to Nowak's findings on Oct. 10, 2006, the Jordanian government

called the torture allegations "untrue" and noted that they were lodged by people with

criminal records.

"It is common for prisoners to make false allegations about torture in a pathetic

attempt to evade punishment and to influence the court," the government wrote.

In interviews with The Washington Post, however, former prisoners of the GID gave

similar accounts of physical abuse.

Masaad Omer Behari, a Sudanese citizen, spent 86 days in the department's custody in

early 2003 after he was arrested during a stopover at Amman's international airport.

Behari said his interrogators wanted to know about his activities in Vienna, where he

had lived for more than a decade. He had been asked many of the same questions previously by

the FBI and Austrian security officials about an alleged plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in

Vienna in 1998, he said, though he had denied any role and was never charged.

While he was in custody in Amman, Behari said, guards meted out a combination of falaqa

and farruj. They struck the soles of his feet with batons while he was handcuffed and

hanging upside down, then doused him with cold water and forced him to walk over a

salt-strewn floor.

"I thought they were going to kill me," he said. "I said my prayers, thinking I was

going to die."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2007/12/01/ST2007120100473.html?hpid=topnews

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There's a new page describing the social aspects of American Fascism at

http://politicsusaweb.com/RootsOfFascism.html

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Still the most concise explanation of how we are who we are:

"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress

of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her August claims, have been

born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing,

and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it

does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor

freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the

ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the

awful roar of its many waters."

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be

both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a

demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly

submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will

be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words

or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those

whom they oppress."

---Frederick Douglass

Source: Douglass, Frederick. [1857] (1985). "The Significance of

Emancipation in the West Indies." Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3,

1857; collected in pamphlet by author.

http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm

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