Today’s Must ReadThe Washington Post interviewed a former detainee in one of the CIA’s “black sites,” to give the most detailed description yet of what the facilities are like.
Marwan Jabour was picked up in Pakistan in May, 2004, “beaten, abused and burned’ at a jailhouse in Lahore where “two female American interrogators also questioned him and told him he would be rich if he cooperated and would vanish for life if he refused.” From there, it was off to a “villa in a wealthy residential neighborhood” nearby, which is actually a detention facility run by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence. There, he “was chained to a wall and prevented from sleeping more than a few hours at a time” and was “beaten nightly by Pakistani guards after hours of questions from U.S. interrogators.”
After five weeks there, he was off to the black site, a facility somewhere in Afghanistan:
Jabour said he was often naked during his first three months at the Afghan site, which he spent in a concrete cell furnished with two blankets and a bucket. The lights were kept on 24 hours a day, as were two cameras and a microphone inside the cell. Sometimes loud music blasted through speakers in the cells. The rest of the time, the low buzz of white noise whizzed in the background, possibly to muffle any communication by prisoners through cell walls.
Daily interrogations were conducted by a variety of Americans. Over two years, Jabour said he encountered about 45 interrogators, plus medical staff and psychologists. He was threatened with physical abuse but was never beaten.
Conditions “slowly improved” for Jabour, who eventually received privileges like pants, air conditioning, a library, movies, and Kit-Kat bars.
The details go on, but perhaps the most striking thing about Jabour’s account is that he was eventually let go. A U.S. counterterrorism official the Post interviewed said that Jabour was “in direct touch with top al-Qaeda operations figures,” was a money man for jihadists, and is “an all-around bad guy.” Nevertheless, they let him go on June 30, 2006, “just after the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s assertion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners like him,” the Post notes. Jabour lives with his parents in the Gaza strip.
The Post also adds more details on the number of people who were held in such “black sites”:
Human Rights Watch has identified 38 people who may have been held by the CIA and remain unaccounted for. Intelligence officials told The Post that the number of detainees held in such facilities over nearly five years remains classified but is higher than 60. Their whereabouts have not been publicly disclosed.
Only 14 detainees were moved from CIA custody to the Guantanamo Bay last summer. “[S]cores more have not been publicly identified by the U.S. government, and their whereabouts remain secret,” the Post reports.
Note: There’s more on Jabour at Human Rights Watch.
