Post Reporters Linzer and Tate Buy Jihadist Jabour's Story Hook, Line, and Sinker
New Light Shed on CIA's 'Black Site' PrisonsFirst why should I believe this guy? Am I supposed to believe him because Human Rights Watch says so? Because these Post reporters say so? Second, I hope that we are doing all of these things and more to get what information is available about what terrorists are doing.
By Dafna Linzer and Julie Tate
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 28, 2007; Page A01
On his last day in CIA custody, Marwan Jabour, an accused al-Qaeda paymaster, was stripped naked, seated in a chair and videotaped by agency officers. Afterward, he was shackled and blindfolded, headphones were put over his ears, and he was given an injection that made him groggy. Jabour, 30, was laid down in the back of a van, driven to an airstrip and put on a plane with at least one other prisoner.
His release from a secret facility in Afghanistan on June 30, 2006, was a surprise to Jabour -- and came just after the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's assertion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners like him.
Jabour had spent two years in "black sites" -- a network of secret internment facilities the CIA operated around the world. His account of life in that system, which he described in three interviews with The Washington Post, offers an inside view of a clandestine world that held far more prisoners than the 14 men President Bush acknowledged and had transferred out of CIA custody in September.
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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.
I support what the CIA is alledged to be doing. I support interrogation techniques which cause discomfort. There is a difference between torture-as in sawing the head off of a prisoner while he is still alive and awake or feeding your prisoners into a plastics grinder feet first-and using discomfort to elicit information.
The most pitiful straw man argument against the treatment and interrogation techniques that are alleged to be being used against our enemies is that our enemies will feel free to torture our POW's when they are captured. When have they ever done so? Did the Japanese treat our prisoners humanely? Did the North Koreans? Did the North Vietnamese? Have the terrorists? Talk about a sad excuse for an argument.








