Black sites open til end of '06, says HRW

A Human Rights Watch report came out this week, recounting the experience of "ghost detainee," Islamic militant Marwan Jabour. The report insinuates that until the US discloses more information about the Black Sites it operated, it is possible that the CIA still holds a number of people in secret custody. This in spite of the Bush administration's declaration last year that "ghost detainees" would be either accounted for or released.

HRW focuses on the Jabour case and demonstrates how inhumane "disappearance" is for families of those taken away.

Jabour was released in November 2006, a full two months after the US claimed the last ghost detainees were accounted for. He had been in custody in Jordan for the early part of 2006.

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 details of the abuse he suffered in American custody, which only years ago would have deeply shocked the world, now seem horribly "normal":

Jabour was arrested in Lahore, he believes by the Pakistani intelligence services, and the worst physical abuses he endured took place while he was in their custody. He alleges that they beat him severely, burnt him with a red hot iron, and tied a tight rubber string around his penis, causing enormous pain. On this third day in Pakistani custody, three people he believes were Americans questioned him; the following day he was transferred to a secret facility in Islamabad. This facility had both US and Pakistani personnel, but the Americans seemed to be in charge.

Both in the Lahore facility and in Islamabad, Jabour endured many days of forced sleeplessness and forced standing, with little respite. Twice he collapsed, falling unconscious.

After a month in Islamabad he was flown to a secret prison, which he believes was in Afghanistan, where all of the personnel (except possibly the interpreters) were American. There, he was held completely naked for a month and a half, filmed naked, and interrogated naked. He was chained tightly to the wall of his small cell so he could not stand up, placed in painful stress positions so that he had difficulty breathing, and warned that if he did not cooperate he would be put in a suffocating “dog box.”

As the months went by, some aspects of Jabour’s treatment improved: his clothes were slowly returned; the physical mistreatment ended; he was placed in a larger cell; he got better food. Other aspects, however, changed slowly or not at all. He spent nearly all of his time alone in a windowless cell. He went a year and a half without a glimpse of sunlight. He wore leg irons for a year and a half. Worst of all, he spent more than two years with almost no contact with any human being besides his captors. Although he worried incessantly about his wife and three young daughters, he was not even allowed to send them a letter to reassure them that he was alive.