The Washington Post reports that the Bush administration, since 9/11, has been sending terrorism suspects to Jordan to be questioned and tortured by its intelligence service (known as the General Intelligence Department, or “GID”). As the article notes, the GID had gained a reputation for “persuading tight-lipped suspects to talk, even if it meant using abusive tactics that could violate U.S. or international law.” In fact, abuse is what the GID appears to specialize in:
Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the “grilled chicken,” in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten.
In a report released in January 2007, Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator for torture, found that “the practice of torture is routine” at GID headquarters and concluded “that there is total impunity for torture and ill-treatment in the country.”
This makes me sick.