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Dirty Little Secrets

Tales of American/Israeli Torture Ties

by Yossi Melman, August 01, 2007

Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli jail of Shikma in the city of Ashkelon on August 14, 2004. The US has adopted many controversial Israeli interrogation and counterterrorism methods since 9/11.

Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli jail of Shikma in the city of Ashkelon on August 14, 2004. The US has adopted many controversial Israeli interrogation and counterterrorism methods since 9/11.


In May, 10 members of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), working under the auspices of Center for Public Integrity, began the release of a series of articles, titled “Collateral Damage,” reporting on a year-long investigation to assess “the impact of foreign lobbying and terrorism on post-9/11 US military training and assistance policies.” Highlighting almost 80 countries on four continents, the ICIJ discovered linkages between political pressure applied by a post-9/11 US, coercive lobbying by foreign governments who were the beneficiaries of assistance, and aid dollars that “have reshaped policies toward countries ranging from tiny Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, to Pakistan and Thailand in Asia, to Poland and Romania in Europe, even to Colombia.”

As the investigation points out, billions of dollars of military aid has been given to countries whose horrible humanitarian rights offenses saw the US eliminate or restrict aid pre-9/11. Claiming that “neither the Defense Department nor Congress has done as much as it could to make sure the money was spent as intended, providing what one seasoned congressional aide described as ‘a blank check,’” the investigation also takes a look into claims of extraordinary rendition by CIA agents—the kidnapping of people in their own countries who are then transported to prisons in foreign countries “known for torturing prisoners.”

All results of the ICIJ investigation can be found at the Center for Public Integrity website (www.publicintegrity.org), including extensive databases depicting country breakdowns of human rights violations of US recipients of military aid in 2005, and country-by-country breakdowns of US military aid recipients pre- and post-9/11.

The following article highlights the US-Israel relationship.

                                                                                                                    —Lorna Tychostup

The King Hussein Bridge is the most direct route from Amman to Jerusalem, but it was not a trip Marwan Ibrahim Mahmoud Jabour wanted to make—he had no choice. It was September 2006, and Jabour, a 30-year-old Jordanian engineer who says he made the mistake of going to Afghanistan in a fruitless attempt to join the jihad, had spent the last two years as a US prisoner—possibly in Afghanistan but he wasn’t sure, since his captors had never revealed the location. According to a sworn affidavit he gave to an Israeli military court, he’d spent much of that time naked and alone in a tiny cell with a bucket to serve as a toilet, being subjected to loud music and hot or freezing temperatures, presumably to soften him up for interrogations that went on for as long as 14 straight hours.

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