'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

The terrible odyssey of Marwan Jabour

Human Rights Watch and the WaPo have both done ground-breaking work on the case of Marwan Jabour, a Palestinian whom the US accused of funding and helping Al-Qaeda operatives and who was held by the CIA and its Pakistani and other subordinate agencies in horrendously degrading conditions in secret, "black" prisons for two years.

The WaPo's report, published in today's paper by Dafna Linzer and Julie Tate, is here. The portal to the lengthy HRW report (which I haven't had time to read in full) is here.

Back in September, when the Bushites transported 14 alleged "high-value detainees" from US-supervised black prisons in (most likely) Pakistan and Afghanistan to Guantanamo, they assured us publicly that the whole of the black prison program had then been shut down. Human Rights Watch is very dubious of this claim. The organization's Joanne Mariner has written a letter to President Bush, in which she lists the names of 16 people whom HRW believes were held in CIA prisons and whose current whereabouts are unknown, and the names of another 22 people who may have been held in CIA prisons and whose current whereabouts are unknown.

What has happened to these "disappeared" individuals? And how, given the horrible record of these secret prisons, can we be assured there are not dozens of others like them whose names we do not know??

The HRW report on the odyssey of Marwan Jabour is lengthy and detailed, but it is well presented on their website through this portal. Jabour was arrested in Lahore, Pakistan, in May 2004. He was held under Pakistani and US custody in different secret prisons in Lahore and Islamabad in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan. During his captivity he was subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, and many other forms of torture and degrading and inhumane treatment until he was transported from Afghnaistan to Jordan in July 2006.

Here's how Linzer and Tate start their story in today's WaPo:

On his last day in CIA custody, Marwan Jabour, an accused al-Qaeda paymaster, was stripped naked, seated in a chair and videotaped by agency officers. Afterward, he was shackled and blindfolded, headphones were put over his ears, and he was given an injection that made him groggy. Jabour, 30, was laid down in the back of a van, driven to an airstrip and put on a plane with at least one other prisoner.

His release from a secret facility in Afghanistan on June 30, 2006, was a surprise to Jabour -- and came just after the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's assertion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners like him...

According to the HRW report, Jabour was transported by plane from Afghanistan to Jordan (amid some very fear-inducing circumstances), and later from there to Israel. After the Israelis examined his case-- and gave him the first access he had ever had to a lawyer, since his detention in May 2004-- they determined he was not a threat and transported him to Gaza, where he was freed and reunited with his parents.

Above, I note in particular the detail about Jabour having been-- just before his transfer from Afghanistan to Jordan-- stripped naked and videotaped. I am pretty sure the CIA people running that black prison would have done that with the aim of making him too embarrassed about the threat of the possible release of those tapes to be easily willing to speak out publicly about the treatment he had received during his two-plus years in CIA custody.

I therefore applaud his courage in breaking through that barrier of fear.

Jabour himself told HRW that when the time approached for his release from the CIA black prison in Afghanistan, the prison's assistant director told him,

there was no toilet in the plane so Jabour would have to wear diapers, and that they would make a video of his naked body to show that his body had not been harmed.

The next day he was wrapped up like a mummy and taken by car to an airstrip. The HRW report continues:

Jabour was brought outside and put in a chair, and he heard three shots. “I was afraid,” he said. “I thought they were shooting people.” The team was very aggressive with him, increasing his fear.

Suddenly they removed all of his wrappings and took off all his clothes. When his eyes opened, he saw a man pointing a video camera at him. Then the transfer team put a diaper on him, and put the same outfit back on, except this time they used plastic handcuffs.

He could only feel the airplane; he could not see it, but it seemed to him to be a small civilian jet. The seats faced forward, as in a normal passenger aircraft. In the plane, during the flight, a doctor took his blood pressure. The flight lasted about three-and-a-half to four hours.

It is very likely, of course, that a plane traveling that distance would be equiped with some form of toilet facilities.

(I note that all the accounts of how prisoners were transported to Guantanamo over the years include accounts of how the circumstances of these transfers were nearly always made as physically humiliating and as fear-inducing as possible. This is straight out of the CIA's classic torture handbooks.

As for Linzer and Tate, they also write this:

U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials confirmed [Jabour's] incarceration and that he was held in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They would not discuss conditions inside black sites or the treatment of any detainee.

And crucially, they note this:

John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, plans to investigate the fate of the missing detainees as part of a larger examination into the CIA's operation of secret prisons and its rendition program.

This is excellent news, and is the first step we need if we, the concerned and law-abiding US citizenry, are able to recapture our country as place that is ruled by law and in which black prisons, torture, and the unbridled militarism and sense of national "chosen-ness" that incubated those ills are to be made into a thing of the past.