Palestinian security agents who have been detaining and allegedly torturing supporters of the Islamist organization Hamas in the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA.
Less than a year after US President Barack Obama signed an executive order that prohibited torture and provided for the lawful interrogation of detainees in US custody, evidence is emerging the CIA is cooperating with security agents whose continuing use of torture has been widely documented by human rights groups.
The relationship between the CIA and the two Palestinian agencies involved — Preventive Security Organization (PSO) and General Intelligence Service (GI) — is said by some Western diplomats and other officials in the region to be so close that the US agency appears to be supervising the Palestinians’ work.
One senior Western official said: “The [Central Intelligence] Agency consider them as their property, those two Palestinian services.”
A diplomatic source added that US influence over the agencies was so great they could be considered “an advanced arm of the war on terror.”
While the CIA and the Palestinian Authority (PA) deny the US agency controls its Palestinian counterparts, neither denies that they interact closely in the West Bank.
Details of that co-operation are emerging as some human rights organizations are beginning to question whether US intelligence agencies may be turning a blind eye to abusive interrogations conducted by other countries’ intelligence agencies with whom they are working.
According to the Palestinian watchdog al-Haq, human rights in the West Bank and Gaza have “gravely deteriorated due to the spreading violations committed by Palestinian actors” this year.
Most of those held without trial and allegedly tortured in the West Bank have been supporters of Hamas, which won the Palestinian elections in 2006 but is denounced as a terrorist organization by the PA — which in turn is dominated by the rival Fatah political faction — and by the US and EU.
In the Gaza Strip, where Hamas has been in control for more than two years, there have been reports of its forces detaining and torturing Fatah sympathizers in the same way.
Among the human rights organizations that have documented or complained about the mistreatment of detainees held by the PA in the West Bank are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, al-Haq and the Israeli watchdog B’Tselem. Even the PA’s human rights commission has expressed “deep concern” over the mistreatment of detainees.
The most common complaint is that detainees are severely beaten and subjected to a torture known as shabeh, during which they are shackled and forced to assume painful positions for long periods. There have also been reports of sleep deprivation and of large numbers of detainees being crammed into small cells to prevent rest.
Instead of being brought before civilian courts, almost all the detainees enter a system of military justice under which they need not be brought before a court for six months.
Some of the mistreatment has been so severe that at least three detainees have died in custody this year.
While there is no evidence the CIA has been commissioning such mistreatment, human rights activists say it would end promptly if US pressure was brought to bear on the Palestinian authorities.
Shawan Jabarin, general director of al-Haq, said: “The Americans could stop it any time. All they would have to do is go to [prime minister] Salam Fayyad and tell him they were making it an issue.”
PA Interior Minister Sa’id Abu-Ali accepted detainees had been tortured and some had died, but said such abuses had not been official policy and steps were being taken to prevent them.
He said such abuses “happen in every country in the world.”
Abu-Ali sought initially to deny the CIA was “deeply involved” with the two Palestinian intelligence agencies responsible for the torture of Hamas sympathizers, but then conceded that links did exist.
“There is a connection, but there is no supervision by the Americans,” he said. “It is solely a Palestinian affair. But the Americans help us.”
The CIA does not deny working with the PSO and GI in the West Bank, although it will not say what use it has made of intelligence extracted during the interrogation of Hamas supporters. But it denies turning what one official described as “a Nelson’s eye to abuse.”
The CIA’s spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, denied it played a supervisory role over the PSO or GI.
“The notion that this agency somehow runs other intelligence services ... is simply wrong,” he said. “The CIA ... only supports, and is interested in, lawful methods that produce sound intelligence.”
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