By Ben Turner
Impunity Watch Reporter, Middle East
AMMAN, Jordan – On April 8, Humans Rights Watch (HRW) released a report that said the CIA transferred at least 14 terror suspects to Jordan for interrogation after the September 11, attacks.
The 36-page report documents how Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID) served as a proxy jailer and interrogator for the US from 2001 until at least 2004. The report alleges that the GID systematically tortured the prisoners, commonly using a torture method falaqa, a method by which the prisoners are given extended beatings on the bottoms of their feet.
“The Bush administration claims that it has not transferred people to foreign custody for abusive interrogation,” said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. “But we’ve documented more than a dozen cases in which prisoners were sent to Jordan for torture.”
The report was based largely on firsthand information from Jordanian former prisoners who were detained with the non-Jordanian terrorism suspects and details eight previously unknown cases of rendition. None are known to have been charged with a criminal offense.
One of the rendered prisoners, Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, provided a handwritten note which he wrote while in Jordanian custody in 2002. In the note, al-Sharqawi says that GID interrogators beat him “in a way that does not know any limits.” The note continues, “They threatened me with electricity, with snakes and dogs …. [They said] we’ll make you see death . . . They threatened to rape me.”
The Jordanian government denied HRW’s allegations. The Jordanian Minister of State for Information and Communications Nasser Joudeh said the report “was wrong, untrue and was based on individual allegations and conclusions based on non-objective grounds” Jordanian newspapers reported on April 9.
“Jordan is undergoing an intentional slander campaign by members of terrorism groups who were trained to provide rights groups with false information to undermine anti-terrorism efforts,” Joudeh said.
The CIA declined to comment on the report. “The agency does not, as a rule, comment publicly on allegations of specific rendition activities,” spokesman Paul Gimigliano said. Gimigliano did, however, defend renditions as a “lawful, valuable tool.”
“They have been used for years to take terrorists off the streets,” he said. “The United States does not transport individuals for the purpose of torture, and has no interest in any process that would produce bad intelligence.”
U.S. officials have acknowledged flying up to 150 of the most serious suspected terrorists secretly from one country to another, but have said they received diplomatic assurances from foreign authorities that they would not be tortured.
The HRW report said that at least five Yemenis, three Algerians, two Saudis, a Mauritanian, a Syrian, a Tunisian, and one or more Chechens from Russia were rendered to Jordan. According to the report, five of them are now in U.S. custody in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
For more information, please see:
Associated Press – HRW: CIA Sent 14 Suspects to Jordan – 9 April 2008
Reuters – Jordan Denies Report on CIA Renditions – 9 April 2008
Human Rights Watch – US/Jordan: Stop Renditions to Torture – 8 April 2008
UPI – Report Alleges U.S. ‘Renditions’ to Jordan – 8 April 2008
