[R-G] Jordan's Spy Agency: Holding Cell for the CIA

[Anthony Fenton]

Jordan's Spy Agency: Holding Cell for the CIA
Foreign Terror Suspects Tell of Torture
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/ 
AR2007113002484_pf.html

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 1, 2007; A01

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."

Researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.