Scanlyze

Human Rights Watch: Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention

Human Rights Watch has compiled a comprehensive report about the case of one of the “disappeared”, Marwan Jabour. Most of the docile and pathetic British and US press have ‘reported’ on this publication without managing to link to it or even so much as mention the name of the report!

Here’s a bit from the Summary:

When Marwan Jabour opened his eyes, after a blindfold, a mask, and other coverings were taken off him, he saw soldiers and, on the wall behind them, framed photographs of King Hussein and King Abdullah of Jordan. He was tired and disoriented from his four-hour plane flight and subsequent car trip, but when a guard confirmed that he was being held in Jordan, he felt indescribable relief. In his more than two years of secret detention, nearly all of it in US custody, this was the first time that someone had told him where he was. The date was July 31, 2006.

A few weeks later, in another first, the Jordanians allowed several of Jabour’s family members to visit him. “My father cried the whole time,” Jabour later remembered.

Marwan Jabour was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Lahore, Pakistan, on May 9, 2004. He was detained there briefly, then moved to the capital, Islamabad, where he was held for more than a month in a secret detention facility operated by both Pakistanis and Americans, and finally flown to a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prison in what he believes was Afghanistan. During his ordeal, he later told Human Rights Watch, he was tortured, beaten, forced to stay awake for days, and kept naked and chained to a wall for more than a month. Like an unknown number of Arab men arrested in Pakistan since 2001, he was “disappeared” into US custody: held in unacknowledged detention outside of the protection of the law, without court supervision, and without any contact with his family, legal counsel, or the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The secret prison program under which Jabour was held was established in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when US President George W. Bush signed a classified directive authorizing the CIA to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists. Because the entire program was run outside of US territory, it required the support and assistance of other governments, both in handing over detainees and in allowing the prisons to operate.

–from the Summary of Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention

See also: BBC Report: ‘Sleaze alleged in CIA’
European Union: Report on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transportation and illegal detention of prisoners

Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy

1 March, 2007 Posted by scanlyze | Afghanistan, archives, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, covert operations, crime, detention, human rights, Human Rights Watch, international law, investigations, Jordan, kidnapping, law, law of nations, Marwan Jabour, memory hole, Middle East, military, news, Pakistan, peace, politics, prisoner, prisoners, rendition, report, repression, torture, war, war crimes | Leave a comment