In the wake of the al Qaeda attack on western hotels in the Jordanian capital Amman earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times' Ken Silverstein reports on the extent of the US's ties to the Jordanian intelligence services. The relationship between the CIA and the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate [GID] now is widely considered to be deeper than US ties to any other intelligence service in the region, including the Mossad, Silverstein reports. And you won't be surprised to learn that it involves the US handing terror suspects over to Jordan for torture:

... The U.S. provides secret financial assistance to subsidize the GID's budget, former senior U.S. intelligence officials said, adding that the two intelligence agencies conduct sophisticated joint operations and routinely share information.

Jordan's intelligence partnership with the U.S. is so close, in fact, that the CIA has had technical personnel "virtually embedded" at GID headquarters, said a former CIA official in the Middle East. One former CIA official said he was allowed to roam the halls of the GID unescorted.

Most recently, Jordan has emerged as a hub for "extraordinary renditions," the controversial, covert transfer of suspected extremists from U.S. custody to foreign intelligence agencies.

GID personnel are characterized as highly capable interrogators by Frank Anderson, a former CIA Middle East division chief. "They're going to get more information [from a terrorism suspect] because they're going to know his language, his culture, his associates — and more about the network he belongs to," he said.

But in two previously undisclosed cases, citizens of Yemen say they were detained in Pakistan and Afghanistan, then transported to Jordan and held by the GID, their lawyers said. One of the detainees said he was tortured by the Jordanian service and then handed back to American authorities.

The State Department praised Jordan for combating terrorism in one report this year and accused it of human rights abuses in another. ...

Here's the link. Is a day of public reckoning at what is going on at hand? Or like Senator Frist, would most Americans just rather not know? That is what the White House is counting on, and I expect that for a variety of reasons, chiefly the exposure of Cheney's advocacy for a CIA torture exemption and the White House's very public threats to veto two bills that would ban torture, covering it up at this point is going to get more difficult as a domestic political issue. And have you noticed how it is the same constellation of characters involved in the torture debate which is also involved in the whole question of the war-time intelligence use and manipulation and cover up? That issue too doesn't seem to be going anywhere but to the top of the national news radar.

Here's a report that says that many CIA officials do not want the agency to be exempted from McCain's anti-torture amendment, as Cheney is requesting. Their rationale? Purely pragmatic. Torture doesn't produce good information. As former CIA officer Bob Baer told the paper, "The Saudis and Egyptians torture people all the time, but I have yet to see anything that helped us on the jihad movement and (Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman al) Zawahri."

Cheney's crew has always believed that it is the nature of the regime, not the tactics or the weapons, that is the issue. In other words, it's one thing for Pakistan to have nukes, quite another for Iran to get them. His torture philosophy is similar. If the good guys are using it, it's fine. The tactic itself, the weapon itself is neutral. So why are we the only good guys who seem to use it? The British don't torture, the Israelis don't torture, the French don't torture, the Italians don't torture, the Canadians don't torture, the Germans don't torture (can you even begin to imagine the international outcry if they did?). Why are we in a club that includes Iran, Syria, North Korea, Uzbekistan, you know, history's real winners, the real A list of human rights standards in the world. Why are the regimes we have to extraordinarily render suspects to ones like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt - ones themselves on the path towards eventual regime collapse? History has already proven Cheney mistaken on the nature of the regime argument -- US-friendly regimes after all produced the terrorists who attacked America on September 11th, and Pakistani's nuclear program could ultimately prove the very gravest threat to US national security, even though its current rulers are pleasant to Washington. History will prove Cheney wrong about the torture as well. That it will have hurt US prestige and power far more than it proved an even useful tool in the war on terror.

Update: Here's the Post's Jefferson Morley on European newspaper reaction to the CIA black site prisons story. And more from Human Rights First. And more from a former Pentagon official writing in the Baltimore Sun.

Dana Priest's chat on her black sites stories and reaction is well worth reading as well.

Posted by Laura at November 11, 2005 06:46 AM