At least a dozen countries were involved in providing the United States secret detention facilities for rendered prisoners, including Azerbaijan, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand, and Uzbekistan. PUCs were flown around the world to different locations on private jets belonging to dummy companies owned by the CIA. Journalists tracked seventy-five trips around the world that one jet made between 2001 and 2005.
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In the process of rendition, the guilty and the innocent disappeared for years. Maher Arar, thirty-five, a Canadian software engineer abducted by the CIA in New York in September 2002, was taken to Syria, where he was held for a year. He was never charged and was freed after protests by the Canadian government.
The worst abusers of human rights received the most prisoners. The CIA never explained why it was choosing as its partners dubious regimes that had been condemned by the State Department for human rights abuses. “All I want to say is that there was ‘before 9/11’ and ‘after 9/11,’” said Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. “After 9/11 the gloves came off.”
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For the Bush administration, that was enough of an explanation.
With the United States leading the way in the abuse of prisoners and flouting the GC and international law, it was natural that their allies, such as Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, would follow suit. These countries carried out their own renditions and disappearances of prisoners, undermining their own legal processes and opening the way for local rulers to deal with domestic political opponents in the same manner. The deterioration of human rights in each country became linked to that government’s proximity to the CIA.
The international community had gone to great lengths to set up a credible government in Kabul, but the effort was totally undermined when the CIA used the fledgling government and the powerful warlords to run secret prison systems. Thus, captured Taliban were frequently transferred to the Riasat Amniat-e-Meli, or National Directorate of Security (NDS), which had been modeled on the KGB in the 1980s and was controlled by the Northern Alliance after 9/11. The NDS held dozens of Taliban and other rendered prisoners on behalf of the CIA, and was ordered not to disclose these prisoners to the ICRC.
Foreign diplomats in Kabul became aware that the NDS was holding such prisoners only in August 2002, when thirteen prisoners, including eleven Pakistanis, escaped from D-3, a secret NDS detention center in Kabul. Afghan soldiers who gave chase killed twelve of them. This incident, which has not been disclosed until now, was particularly embarrassing for the International Security Assistance Force because it occurred in a zone under its control. Human Rights Watch and other groups documented extensive use of torture and abuse by the NDS. The editor of a Kabul magazine whom I know well and who had published an offending cartoon of NA leaders was visited by NDS officials in his office and told bluntly, “Look, we have thirty bullets in our clip, we can shoot thirty bullets into your chest right now and there is no one who can stop us.”
In 2004, Karzai appointed Amrullah Saleh as the director-general of the NDS. A former intelligence aide to Ahmad Shah Masud and his liaison with the CIA before 9/11, Saleh was a young Panjsheri Tajik, but he broke with his own group to support Karzai and started to reform and modernize the NDS with help from the CIA and MI6. Saleh purged hundreds of officers, improved pay scales, and modernized training, turning the NDS from a factional into a national organization. Intelligence gathering seemed to have improved, because when the Taliban began suicide bombings in Kabul, the NDS caught several Taliban groups before they could set off their bombs. However, under Saleh, the NDS continued to carry out renditions on behalf of the CIA, and there were continuing reports of the NDS’s extensive use of torture even as late as 2008.
Until the summer of 2003, warlords and commanders on the U.S. payroll also maintained their own prisons, often holding them on behalf of the Americans. In Herat, the warlord Ismael Khan frequently used torture. Prisoners described how “beatings, hanging upside-down, whipping, and shocking with electrical wires attached to the toes and thumbs” were commonplace.
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A close friend of mine and a prominent lawyer in Herat, Rafiq Shahir, was arrested by Ismael Khan, who wanted to stop him from contesting a seat for the Loya Jirga in 2002. His family asked me to save his life. I telephoned several prominent officials in Kabul, asking them to intervene, but by the time Shahir was freed he had been whipped, beaten, and threatened with death. The scars on his back and stomach still show.
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The fundamentalist warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf maintained several prisons just outside Kabul. Hazrat Ali, a key ally of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, ran private jails, while his commanders indulged in robbery, kidnapping, and sexual violence against young boys, even as they served under the command of the U.S. SOF. The warlords terrorized civilians, knowing they would never be reprimanded by the Americans. U.S. forces were to establish the same systems of secret detention in Iraq, using Iraqi warlords and military units.
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The abuse of prisoners by U.S. jailers at Abu Ghraib was only a follow-on to what had already happened in Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s military regime learned American methods most quickly. Initially Musharraf did not want to hold al Qaeda prisoners, as he feared a domestic backlash, so captured foreign prisoners were flown to Kandahar. But as more foreigners were caught—many of them innocent—the ISI set up its own detention centers. Foreigners were held in Kohat jail, in the North-West Frontier Province, where joint teams from the ISI, CIA, and FBI interrogated them. Pakistanis were held at Haripur jail, close to Islamabad, where the Americans had only limited access. By the spring of 2002 two hundred foreigners were being held in Kohat and four hundred Pakistanis in Haripur jail. Later, the army set up another jail, in Alizai, in the tribal areas, for those caught in FATA. Musharraf established anti-terrorist courts, which allowed the government to detain prisoners for one year without being charged.
The ISI was anxious to keep certain captured Pakistani militants away from U.S. interrogators, especially those who had fought on behalf of the ISI in Kashmir or Afghanistan or who had trained at ISI-run training camps. The ISI was naturally nervous about these extremists divulging information to the CIA. After the assassination attempts against Musharraf in December 2003, hundreds of militants were arrested in Pakistan, but the Americans were not given access to them. Omar Sheikh, the abductor of American journalist Daniel Pearl, was barred from being interrogated by U.S. agencies, and Islamabad ignored a U.S. extradition request for him. Yet Islamabad provided major help to the United States in its rendition program, holding al Qaeda suspects on behalf of the Americans until they were moved to other locations.
The extent to which the ISI interrogated and tortured prisoners on behalf of the CIA was revealed after Marwan Jabour, a Palestinian, was freed in June 2006. He had been arrested in Lahore by the ISI on May 9, 2004, and moved to a safe house in Islamabad run jointly by the ISI and CIA. The safe house contained specially built jail cells, and Jabour saw as many as twenty other prisoners there—many of them Pakistanis. Human Rights Watch documented the cases of half a dozen more Arab and Pakistani prisoners being held in the same safe house. Jabour was beaten and abused by his Pakistani guards and chained nightly to a wall. Other abuses included tying a rubber band around his penis and burning his arms and legs with a red-hot iron. He had two heart attacks while in detention.
Jabour was interrogated by CIA officers who included two young American women. The Pakistanis never tortured him in the presence of the Americans—a clear indication of the rules under which the CIA operated: foreign intelligence agencies could not use torture in the presence of the CIA. Jabour was later moved to a CIA black site outside Kabul and then to Israel, where he was freed. He admitted to having trained at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 1998 and to helping Arabs escape from Afghanistan in 2003, but he was never a member of al Qaeda and had not fought against the United States.
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The secret prisons proved especially useful in 2004 after the Pakistan army launched military operations in Waziristan, where hundreds of tribesmen were arrested. In August 2004, the ICRC issued a démarche to Islamabad, demanding access to all prisoners captured in Waziristan, but it was rejected by Islamabad, which claimed that the war in Waziristan was not an armed conflict but criminality. The military was angry with the ICRC for its alleged failure to free the six hundred Pakistani prisoners still being held by General Dostum in northern Afghanistan. These prisoners were eventually freed in 2004, but they were rearrested by the ISI when they arrived back home.
Musharraf used the same harsh antiterrorism laws to deal with his political opponents at home. Asma Jehangir, head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), drew up a list of more than four hundred missing persons—people abducted, detained, or simply “disappeared” between 2001 and 2006. The HRCP began to document each case and appealed to the courts to free these prisoners. “The government is using the war on terror as an excuse to pick up and disappear hundreds of its political opponents, including those who are just critical of certain policies,” Jehangir told me. The disappeared include journalists, scientists, political workers, and nationalists, with the largest number being political activists from Sindh and the insurgency-hit province of Balochistan. Baloch nationalists claimed that more than seven hundred Baloch political workers disappeared in 2006. Using the courts to try to force the government to declare these people’s whereabouts led to the disappeared being moved from the custody of one intelligence agency to another, so that the government could maintain deniability.
Housewife Amina Janjua’s husband, Masud, disappeared in July 2005, and for the next two years Amina and her children struggled to discover his whereabouts. Amina began a very public campaign for his release, which soon snowballed into a nationwide campaign for the release of hundreds of the disappeared. She joined with other families of the disappeared to create the Defense of Human Rights group. In December 2006, dozens of women—wives, daughters, and sisters of missing men—held an unprecedented demonstration outside parliament in Islamabad, shouting, “Give us back our loved ones!” The police beat the protesters, including Janjua’s seventeen-year-old son, whose pants were stripped off by the police.
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Musharraf not only had copied U.S. policies on how to make prisoners disappear but had developed new ones in order to secure his own political future.
In January 2007 the usually pliant Supreme Court of Pakistan demanded that the intelligence agencies find forty-one people whose cases had been documented by human rights groups. The government suddenly declared that it had freed twenty-five people from the list, although they were too terrified to talk about their experiences. They had been held in safe houses around the country by either Military Intelligence (MI) or the ISI. As the Supreme Court took up more cases of the disappeared, and humiliated the ISI and MI in the process, Musharraf suspended Iftikhar Chaudhry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, which led to a mass movement against the regime by lawyers. The army refused to tolerate an activist judiciary that for the first time was determined to implement the law.
Even before 9/11, Uzbekistan under President Islam Karimov was one of the worst human rights offenders in the world. There were ten thousand political prisoners in Uzbek jails, a result of a vicious crackdown in the 1990s against anyone who opposed the president. Uzbekistan was also the only Muslim country where a person could be jailed for being too Islamic, such as for saying his prayers five times a day at the mosque. There was no independent judiciary, and the courts were controlled by the government. During trials the accused was unable to defend himself or call upon witnesses.
It would seem that an alliance with the CIA could not possibly make the Uzbek secret service much worse, but it did. After Karimov allied with Washington, more Uzbeks were arrested and there were no limits to the extent that torture was used. Two prisoners, Muzafar Avazov and Khuzniddin Alimov, who were accused of belonging to an Islamic extremist group, died on August 8, 2002, after being boiled to death in hot water. In measures unheard of even in communist times, prisoners were forbidden to fast during the fasting month of Ramadan, and the Koran was banned from cells.
Uzbekistan became the main jailer for the CIA for rendition suspects caught in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The extraordinary details of the alliance between the CIA, MI6, and the Uzbek secret service came to light thanks to Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Tashkent who was so appalled by what he witnessed in Uzbekistan that first privately and then publicly he tried to change British government policy. In a 2003 speech made in Tashkent that eventually lost him his job, he said, “Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy . . . there are between 7,000 to 10,000 people being held as political or religious prisoners. Many have been falsely convicted. Let’s not make the war on terrorism an excuse to persecute people with a deep commitment to the Islamic religion.”
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Later Murray was to testify to the European Parliament that “under the UK-US intelligence sharing agreement the US and UK have taken a policy decision that they will get testimonies obtained under torture in third countries—I say that with regret and certainty.”
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Murray described photographs of Muzafar Avazov, who had been boiled alive: “His face was bruised, his torso and limbs livid purple. . . . [A pathology report] said that the man’s fingernails had been pulled out, that he had been beaten and that the line around his torso showed he had been immersed in hot liquid. He had been boiled alive.”
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President Karimov was invited to the White House in March 2002, and the CIA provided aid to modernize his intelligence services. The massacre in Andijan of an estimated eight hundred people protesting against the regime on May 13, 2005, led to outrage around the world and finally forced the United States and Europe to roll back their cozy relationship with Uzbekistan. The Americans lost their military base in Uzbekistan in 2006, but the joint U.S.-Uzbek Counterterrorism Center in Tashkent continued to operate.