Middle East Inside Line: The Story Behind CIA Support of Palestinian "Torture"

Last Thursday Ian Cobain of The Guardian of London posted the dramatic article, "CIA working with Palestinian security agents: US agency co-operating with Palestinian counterparts who allegedly torture Hamas supporters in West Bank". The sensational headline both illuminates and distorts the wider story.

For years, the US Government has been pursuing a strategy of bolstering the Palestinian (West Bank) administration of Mahmoud Abbas by providing funding, equipment, and training for the security services of the Palestinian Authority. Ostensibly, this support was part of a US strategy of moving towards an Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" by reassuring Israel that the West Bank security services were under responsible American oversight as they developed.

This policy was reinforced after Hamas' ascendancy to power in Gaza in 2006 and its defeat of Abbas' party, Fatah, in Gazan battles in 2007. Now US aid had become part of a low-grade civil war, bolstering Fatah/Palestinian Authority capabilities against their rivals. Part of that support inevitably was for repressive measures employed by the West Bank security services against "insurgents", usually linked to Hamas.



David Rose exposed the relationship between the US military and CIA with the Palestinian Authority/Fatah agencies in April 2008 in a Vanity Fair article. Cobain's piece confirms that this relationship will continue in the Obama Administration: the US is now locked into support of an Abbas regime, no matter how unstable or repressive it becomes, because there is no alternative both in the pursuit of talks with Israel and in the effort to contain Hamas.

Palestinian security agents who have been detaining and allegedly torturing supporters of the Islamist organisation Hamas in the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA, the Guardian has learned.

Less than a year after 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 co-operating 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 Organisation (PSO) and General Intelligence Service (GI) – is said by some western diplomats and other officials in the region to be so close that the American 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 organisations 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 organisation 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 sympathisers in the same way.

Among the human rights organisations 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.

According to PA officials, between 400 and 500 Hamas sympathisers are held by the PSO and GI.

Some of the mistreatment has been so severe that at least three detainees have died in custody this year. The most recent was Haitham Amr, a 33-year-old nurse and Hamas supporter from Hebron who died four days after he was detained by GI officials last June. Extensive bruising around his kidneys suggested he had been beaten to death. Among those who died in GI custody last year was Majid al-Barghuti, 42, an imam at a village near Ramallah.

While there is no evidence that 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.. Then they could deal with the specifics: they could tell him that detainees needed to be brought promptly before the courts."

A diplomat in the region said "at the very least" US intelligence officers were aware of the torture and not doing enough to stop it. He added: "There are a number of questions for the US administration: what is their objective, what are their rules of engagement? Do they train the GI and PSO according to the manual which was established by the previous administration, including water-boarding? Are they in control, or are they just witnessing?"

Sa'id Abu-Ali, the PA's interior minister, 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 sympathisers, 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."

Concern about detainee abuse is growing in the West Bank despite an effort by the international community to create Palestinian institutions that will guarantee greater security as a first step towards creating a Palestinian state. More than half of the PA's $2.8bn (£1.66bn) budget came from international donors last year; more than a quarter was swallowed up by the ministry of the interior and national security. Human Rights Watch and al-Haq have said that in raising the security capacity of the PA, donor countries have a responsibility to ensure it observes international human rights standards.

At the heart of the international effort is the creation of the Palestinian national security force, a 7,500-strong gendarmerie trained by US, British, Canadian and Turkish army officers under the command of a US general, Keith Dayton. Many Palestinians blame Dayton for the mistreatment of Hamas sympathisers, although the general's remit does not extend to either of the intelligence agencies responsible.

Some in Dayton's team are said to have been warned by senior CIA officers that they should not attempt to interfere in the work of the PSO or GI. Privately, some of them are said to fear that the mistreatment of detainees, and the anger this is arousing among the population, may undermine their mission. One source said: "I know that Dayton and his crew are very concerned about what is happening in those detention centres because they know it can jeopardise their work."

Syria-Lebanon: What is Prime Minister Hariri Seeking?

According to the Syrian news agency Champress, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri told Syrian President Bashar Assad on Saturday that he wishes to improve Lebanese-Syrian relations to better defend Lebanon against Israel, which continues to violate Arab rights. Assad's adviser Buthaina Shaaban said that the talks were "frank" and "succeeded in overcoming difficulties that marred relations in the past five years."

Hariri loyalist and former lawmaker Mustafa Alloush was more cautious: he said that the visit was "very difficult on the personal level" and involves "great sacrifice" and did not mean Lebanon had dropped its belief that Syria was responsible for the killing of Hariri's father Rafik, the former Lebanese Prime Minister assassinated in 2005. However, Alloush added, "As prime minister of Lebanon, it is quite normal to have such a visit....It is necessary and there is a need to settle all aspects of the relationship."

"At the end of the day, Syria is the nearest country to us. God willing this visit will bring stability and security to Lebanon," Bahia al-Hariri, a member of the Lebanese parliament and the premier's aunt, said in Lebanon.

So, what is the outcome of this visit by Hariri? Is it a natural consequence of Hezbollah's weight in the cabinet or just a part of the coalition deal? Or is this an initiative by Hariri to decrease the tension inside Lebanon through an opening to Damascus, offering a diplomatic victory to Syria after five years of tension?

The Latest from Iran (19 December): After the Mythical "Millions"

1735 GMT: Making Stuff Up - The Twitter Attack. There's not much to add to Austin Heap's guest analysis for Enduring America this morning. Instead, The New York Times shows the power of pointless speculation, backed up by lack of any knowledge of important context, in an article by their technology writers:

Beth Jones, a senior threat researcher at the Internet security firm Sophos, said the attack did not look very sophisticated and probably was not the effort of a Web terrorist or other professional. “It could have been any number of people doing it,” she said. Ms. Jones said the incident may have been “hacktivism,” an attack with a social or political motivation. “The point could purely be just to prove the site is insecure,” she said

Just gonna say this one more time: if this was just "hacktivism" unrelated to the Iran internal crisis, why did the attackers first go after one of the Green Movement's primary websites for news?

(For an analysis which is more useful, and a lot funnier, see Persian Umpire's interpretation.)

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1730 GMT: Today's Foreign Enemies Will Kill All Iranians Warning. Let's hand over to Revolutionary Guard Lieutenant Commander Brigadier General Hossein Salami:

Enemies will not give up their devilish moves against the Iranian nation, they have brought their front to our streets and universities today and the battle is still on....Pointing to the enemy's nonstop strategy to confront the Islamic Republic, the commander noted, "These moves form a chain of profound global plot against the Iranian nation....If we do not practice the necessary vigilance, we could (be obliged to) play in the enemy's court.

Etc., etc., etc.

1345 GMT: Confirming Torture Deaths? Mehr News reports that the judicial section of the Armed Forces has concluded that three detainees in the now-closed Kahrizak Prison died from abuse and not from meningitis, as was originally claimed. The deaths cited are those of Mohsen Ruholamini (son of the advisor to Presidential candidate Mohsen Rezaei), Amir Javadifar, and Mohammad Kamrani.

In its investigation of alleged abuses, the panel has questioned 22 people and indicted 12, three of whom are involved in the Kahrizak cases.

1315 GMT: Hashemi, Join Us. In an interview in Mizan News, conducted before Friday's events, the son of Mehdi Karroubi, Hossein, was blunt: people expect former President Hashemi Rafsanjani to distance himself from the Government and join those asking for justice.

1310 GMT: Khatami's Latest Statement. The website supporting Mir Hossein Mousavi published a statement from former President Mohammad Khatami to faculty at Hamedan University, insisting on reform and respect for protest:

The Islamic system does not respect people’s votes, those who behave like this should not claim to be on the path of Imam Khomeini and the revolution....The policy that is accepted in Islam is a moral policy. If we commit the worst actions under the name of religion we cannot claim that we are in favour of religion.

1300 GMT: Did the Clerics-Rafsanjani Initiative Reach Khamenei? Remember our analysis of recent weeks about discussions between senior clerics and former President Hashemi Rafsanjani in a bid for "unity" between the Government and the opposition?

Well, eyebrows are raised over this item from the reformist website Rah-e-Sabz, which claims secret but futile meetings of high-ranking Tehran and Qom clerics with the Supreme Leader. The website adds that the clerics warned Khamenei that many of his religious supporters, and indeed members of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia, are now searching for another "marjah" (source of emulation) after the brutal suppression of protest. (hat-tip to EA reader "Arshama")

1250 GMT: It Just Isn't Going Well. A public sign of doubt after the mini-marches yesterday: an EA reader points out the complaints from a pro-regime website about the "meagre popular support for yesterday’s rallies" and the focus of slogans attacking the opposition, rather than praising Ayatollah Khomeini. (And the comments aren't much more hopeful, with plenty to say about the "lying government".)

1230 GMT: Oh, Mahmoud, You Do Say the Darnedest Things.... Normally I wouldn't bother with this, but it's a relatively slow news day and the statement is kind of funny for its brazenness:

Iran's president says he will soon write to the UN Secretary-General asking for his country to be compensated for World War II damages. "We will seek compensation for World War II damages. I have assigned a team to calculate the costs," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at a Friday press conference in the Danish capital.

"I will write a letter to the UN Secretary-General [Ban Ki-moon] asking for Iran to be compensated for the damages," he added, pointing out that such a move is necessary to ensure that justice was served. Ahmadinejad told the reporters that the countries that won the Second World War had inflicted a lot of damage on Iran by invading the country and using its resources.

The president added that while the former Soviet Union, the United States and Britain received compensation after the conflict, Iran had been given nothing to make up for the suffering its people had endured.

Dude, I don't want to rain on your rhetorical parade, but the UN Secretary-General has no authority to order reparations. You could try the UN Security Council, I guess, but as three of its permanent members are the US, Britain, and Russia....

(And forgive me for being provocative, but wasn't there a really costly war for Iran more recently than 1945? One with a neighbour that supposedly has a bit of money from the oilfields it is auctioning?)

1020 GMT: And if you're into the Iran-Iraq border incident that is not war, Reuters indicates that Iran is seeking a "diplomatic" resolution over the alleged 11-troop occupation of the oil well.

0950 GMT: On the Nuclear Front. In case you want a break from the internal battle in Iran, the latest from Tehran, at least in the form of Ali Akhbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, is good-cop/bad-cop noises.

On Friday, Salehi said that about 6,000 of Iran's centrifuges were operational. That comment was jumped on by some media in the "West" and Israel as a sign of Iran's aggressive intention. In fact, it was far from that: Iran's chief enrichment plant at Natanz has 8000 centrifuges, so Salehi was admitting that, at most, Natanz was 75% effective. (The most recent report of the International Atomic Energy Agency said that half of the centrifuges were working.) Salehi added that Iran would not be adding extra capacity soon, with a new generation of centrifuges not ready until 2011 and the heavy-water plant at Arak still "three or four years" away from service.

Today, however, Salehi is taking a tougher stance, declaring that "the IAEA Board of Governors' resolution against Iran is ineffective" and there would be no halt in the construction of the second enrichment plant at Fordoo.

0920 GMT: We've posted a guest analysis by Austin Heap of yesterday's cyber-attack on Twitter by an Iranian group.

0755 GMT: Mousavi Defiance Behind Regime Threats? One intriguing story this morning: the reformist website Rah-e-Sabz claims that Iran's judiciary pressed Mir Hossein Mousavi to withhold or at least moderate any statement of support for protests on 16 Azar (7 December). Mousavi's refusal, and indeed his publication of a high-profile message to Iranian students, angered the authorities and led to the ominous threats of arrests and trials.

0745 GMT: A morning, and possibly a day, to relax and assess after the fizzling of the regime's attempt to show strength on Friday (see our  special analysis, "RegimeFail").

No sign yet of counter-moves by the opposition, either within or outside the establishment, and Western media are likely to be wandering around after the Iran "invasion of Iraq" story (we're still treating 11 Iranian soldiers raising a flag over an oil well as a political manoeuvre which will bring more politics, rather than confrontation) and whatever pops up on the nuclear front.

Iran Special: Austin Heap on "The Attack on Twitter"

Austin Heap, one of the most prominent activists on the Internet and Iran (see, for example, "The Haystack Project" to provide unfiltered Web access to Iranians), writes a guest blog for Enduring America on yesterday's diversion of Twitter users to the page of the "Iranian Cyber Army":

There were probably a few odd text messages whizzing around in San Francisco at 11 PM on Thursday night at a place called Dyn. It's a company that most people had not heard of, even though it powers websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo. They even have a catchy motto: "Uptime is the Bottom Line". Now, however, a group calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army" had hacked Dyn's servers and changed only a tiny line of text. The outcome was the "occupation" of Twitter, causing a two-hour outage of service for Tweeters around the world.

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Dyn offers a service called managed DNS hosting. Essentially a yellow pages for the Internet, DNS translates lettered website names into an IP address, like phone numbers for computers. When you type in enduringamerica.com on your browser, a request is sent out to a DNS server. The DNS server responds to your browser and says, "enduringamerica.com's IP address is XX.XX.XX.XXX", then your browser "calls" that IP.

Twitter uses Dyn's managed DNS service, so when you visit Twitter's website, your browser first asks Dyn where to find Twitter. Instead of the request being pointed to the correct location, the hackers changed the program so Dyn would tell users around the world that Twitter was now hosted on a server in Provo, Utah, run by a company called Bluehost.

For a handful of frantic hours, when someone tried to reach Twitter's site, they were diverted to a page of the "Iranian Cyber Army". The cyber-warriors greeted them with a message in Arabic and Farsi, placed atop and on a green flag:

Peace be with you. Ya Hossein! If the leader orders us to, we will attack and if he wants us to, we will lose our heads. If he wants us to have patience and wait, we shall sit down and put up with it.

It's a bold move by a group about which people knew little if anything, even though "the Iranian Cyber Army" had pulled off the same manoeuvre days earlier with the prominent Green movement website Mowj-e-Sabz, which has now suspended publication.

The question remains: who are they --- cyber-renegades or a group affiliated with the Iranian regime? Octavia Nasr, CNN's senior editor for Middle East affairs, dramatically announced yesterday, "The hackers are definitely Shiites, as indicated by the 'Ya Hussein' chant printed on their banner." That, however, is far from a solving of the mystery, since the vast majority of Iranians are Shia.

On the surface, it seems unlikely that the Government of Iran would attack a private company in America and even less likely that they would post what amounts to a ransom note with a pretty graphic on it. Sure, government hacking goes on all the time, and the US has even been caught with its hands in some of Iran's most private servers, but that did not come to light until three years after it happened. The threat of exposure of regime responsibility for this incident, with its high-profile target, is much greater.

Meanwhile, the on-line enquiry continues. Given the enormous influx in traffic to their servers from millions of tweeters, one would have expect Bluehost to notice and fix the problem at lighting speed. When asked why they had not responded faster, while the hack was still underway, Bluehost declined to answer. They have since removed the account that was used to host the attackers' message. Twitter also declined to comment beyond their initial verification, which of course came in a Tweet --- their "DNS records were temporarily compromised".

UPDATE: From Bluehost: "Bluehost is a leading Web hosting company that provides services to nearly 2 million Web sites. Bluehost discovered that Twitter.com had been the victim of a DNS compromise and, further, that the attackers had redirected some of the Twitter traffic to an account hosted on Bluehost servers. This customer account on BlueHost was setup using a stolen identity and credit card, as determined by the Bluehost verification department. The Bluehost abuse department immediately terminated this account. Contact was made by Bluehost to law enforcement agents to assist in all ongoing investigations."

UPDATE2: The kind folks at Internet Identity passed along the DNS change records for twitter.com:

2009-12-17 22:01 (PST) 2009-12-18 06:01 UTC www.twitter.com, twitter.com A Records pointed to 74.217.128.160

2009-12-17 22:14 (PST) 2009-12-18 06:14:20 UTC
twitter.com A Records pointed to 69.59.28.85

2009-12-17 22:24 (PST) 2009-12-17 06:24 UTC
twitter.com A Records pointed to 66.147.242.88

2009-12-17 23:11 (PST) 2009-12-18 07:11 UTC
A Records corrected and pointing back to allowed range for resolution

As you can see, the attackers tried three different hosts before sticking with Bluehost. First it was NetFirms, then it was CaroNet, and finally Bluehost.

UPDATE3: From Twitter: "Domain Name System or DNS is an Internet protocol used to translate IP addresses into domain names so instead of typing in a long string of numbers we can enter urls like www.twitter.com into a browser to visit our favorite web sites. Last night, DNS settings for the Twitter web site were hijacked. From 9:46pm to 11pm PST, approximately 80% of Traffic to Twitter.com was redirected to other web sites. We tweeted, blogged, and updated our status page last night.

During the attack, we were in direct contact with our DNS provider, Dynect. We worked closely to reset our DNS as quickly as possible. The motive for this attack appears to have been focused on defacing our site, not aimed at users we don’t believe any accounts were compromised."

Israel & Turkey: Repairing Relations, Leaving Gaza Behind?

On Friday, at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, Israeli President Shimon Peres met his Turkish counterpart, President Abdullah Gul. Following Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak's acceptance of an invitation to Ankara, Gul agreed to consider Peres' invitiation to come to Israel.

During the meeting, Peres tried to deal with the underlying causes of tense Israeli-Turkish relations. He did not defend the "necessity" of the Gaza War, but he blamed Hamas of dragging Gazans into trouble. Peres added:

Israel seeks real, just peace with its neighbors and has announced its willingness to go to great lengths to achieve peace.

Gaza could have turned into a prosperous area under Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas]. Unfortunately, Hamas murdered Fatah leaders in Gaza and is now gravely harming the Palestinian population. If Hamas changes course by recognizing Israel and denouncing terror, the face of Gaza will undergo an extreme change.

Israel & Turkey: Time to Repair Relations?