Former detainee's account does not mesh with official US line on 'black site' prisons
Marwan Jabour spent over 2 years in secret CIA prisons, writes The Washington Post, which interviewed Jabour three times for an article on secret CIA prisons called "black sites."
While the official line from the Bush administration is that the CIA no longer holds any accused terrorists in custody at black sites, the accounts from Jabour and other former detainees often clash with US statements, report Dafna Linzer and Julie Tate.
The article continues, "Although 14 detainees were publicly moved from CIA custody to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, scores more have not been publicly identified by the U.S. government, and their whereabouts remain secret."
Watchdog group Human Rights Watch has identified 38 people who might have been held by the CIA and who are not accounted for. However, "intelligence officials told The Post that the number of detainees held in such facilities over nearly five years remains classified but is higher than 60. Their whereabouts have not been publicly disclosed."
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller (D-WV) plans an investigation into the fate of the missing detainees, along with a larger look at the CIA's secret "black site" prison programs.
Excerpts from the report follow:
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After 28 months of incarceration, Jabour -- who was described by a counterterrorism official in the U.S. government as "a committed jihadist and a hard-core terrorist who was intent on doing harm to innocent people, including Americans" -- was released eight months ago. U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials confirmed his incarceration and that he was held in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They would not discuss conditions inside black sites or the treatment of any detainee.
By Jabour's account, and that of U.S. intelligence officials, his entrance into the black-sites program began in May 2004. In interviews, he said he was muscled out of a car as it pulled inside the gates of a secluded villa in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
In the week before his arrival, Jabour said, Pakistani intelligence officers had beaten, abused and burned him at a jailhouse in Lahore, where he was arrested. There two female American interrogators also questioned him and told him he would be rich if he cooperated and would vanish for life if he refused. He said he was later blindfolded and driven four hours north to the villa in a wealthy residential neighborhood.
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