Jordan, often described in the mainstream press as the most moderate country in the Arab Middle East, was the first to receive prisoners “as a true proxy jailer for the CIA” and has received more victims of “extraordinary rendition” than any other country in the world, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW). The report charges that US officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, were aware that “Jordan was already notorious for torturing security detainees” because the CIA “already had a history of close relations” with Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID).

HRW charges that “Torture and cruel or inhuman treatment seems to have been systematically used” against most of the detainees rendered by the CIA to Jordan. “Detainees claim they were threatened, beaten, insulted, deprived of sleep, and subjected to falaqa — a form of torture in which the soles of the feet are beaten with an object.”The report claims that rendered prisoners were “hidden whenever the International Committee of the Red Cross visited”.

It adds that the CIA’s long-standing relationship with Jordanian security services may have given US officials confidence that the Jordanians “would be particularly good at keeping the fact of the detentions secret”. Joanne Mariner, director of the Terrorism and Counterterrorism Programme for Human Rights Watch, said, “The rendition cases we’ve documented in Jordan show the unreality of Bush administration’s claims that it did not hand people over to face torture.”

She added, “Not only did the CIA illegally detain prisoners in its own prisons in the years after Sept. 11, it secretly outsourced the interrogation, detention, and torture of more than a dozen prisoners in Jordan.” HRW says the precise number of people rendered to Jordan by the CIA is not known. But it asserts that rendered prisoners were taken to Jordan for one purpose only: to extract confessions of terrorist activities. “It is clear that many of the detainees were returned to CIA custody immediately after intensive periods of abusive interrogation in Jordan,” the report says.

The report recalls that Rice, under pressure from European allies because of press revelations about CIA activities in Europe, offered a vigorous defence of US rendition practices in December 2005. Arguing that the practice of rendition was a “vital tool in combating transnational terrorism”, Rice insisted that the US “does not transport, and has not transported, detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture.” However, HRW says, “The systematic nature of the abuses suffered by prisoners rendered to Jordan contradicts Rice’s bland reassurances.”

HRW notes that after Sept. 2001, the CIA’s rendition practices changed. “Rather than returning people to their home countries to face ‘justice’ (albeit justice that included torture and grossly unfair trials), the CIA began handing people over to third countries apparently to facilitate abusive interrogations.”

The HRW report calls on the US to repudiate the use of rendition to torture as a counterterrorism tactic, discontinue the CIA’s rendition programme, and “disclose the identities, fate, and current whereabouts of all persons detained by the CIA or rendered to foreign custody by the CIA since 2001, including detainees who were rendered to Jordan.” — IPS