Jordan GID helpful to CIA

Washington Post:

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."

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The problem with this account is that it relies on hearsay from operatives who have been trained to say they were tortured. Al Qaeda sees the torture meme as a western weakness to exploit and they know the media will help them in that propaganda effort. The reporters have no first hand knowledge of the alleged torture, and they use self serving statements of accused in an attempt to discredit aggressive interrogation techniques.

Jordon has been a good ally in this war. Like many Arab countries they apparently engage in aggressive questioning of suspects. The terrorist rights organizations have also accused the GID of torture, but their credibility is also questionable since they have made bogus charges of torture about Gitmo.

While some of the allegations may be valid, the sources for the story are all people with an agenda and questionable credibility. Since the terrorist rights organizations have made bogus charges against the facility at Gitmo their reports should not be received without question anymore when dealing with suspects in US or allied custody. The main failure of this story is that it does not disclose the serious questions about the use of the torture meme by terrorist who have been trained to do so.