Syria's Far Falestin Prison Contains U.S. Torture Secrets

And for subscribers, here's my new column for Zeteo, out of which the first essay sprang. We need what Assad did for the CIA to come to light.

First essay edited by Sam Thielman; column edited by Zeteo

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INDULGE ME for a moment a point about Syria and the CIA. I know this isn't our usual format when presenting our beloved paying subscribers with a new Zeteo column. But I cut a paragraph from that piece and I want to use this edition to delve into it before reprinting the column behind the paywall. 

My column is about the ideological anti-Islam bent of several senior Trump appointees. Through that prism, it points to major decisions on the Middle East that such appointees will make in the new year. One of the subjects of the piece is Tulsi Gabbard. And last weekend, after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham took Damascus, I read a lot of jokes from liberals hoping that the records of Assad's Mukhabarat (security apparatus) will reveal evidence of Assad paying her off or otherwise compromising the next U.S. director of national intelligence. As you'll see in the piece, I hold no brief for Gabbard, even if at times we take aim at the same Security State targets. But I felt compelled to write the following in an earlier draft of my column before reluctantly realizing that it didn't fit in the overall piece:

After 9/11, Assad helped the post-9/11 CIA torture people in the name of fighting "terrorism." When Assad fell, many of Gabbard's critics joked about hoping to find receipts for her service in the archives of Assad's Mukhabarat. I'd prefer to exhume the archives for what the Mukhabarat did on behalf of the CIA during the Bush administration—which is a matter of fact, not speculation or innuendo. 

One of the earliest FOREVER WARS editions was about how the aspect of CIA torture we know the least about is the part where foreign intelligence services tortured people on the U.S.' behalf. But there is no doubt that Bashar Assad's Syria tortured people for the CIA. I could write a whole thing, but I'll just crib from a piece I did for WIRED in 2013, about an Open Society Foundation report on collaboration with CIA torture, that makes the essential point: 

Iran's proxy Syria did torture on behalf of the United States. The most famous case involves Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen snatched in 2002 by the U.S. at John F. Kennedy International Airport before the CIA sent him to Syria under the mistaken impression he was a terrorist. In Syrian custody, Arar was "imprisoned for more than ten months in a tiny grave-like cell, beaten with cables, and threatened with electric shocks by the Syrian government," [report lead investigator Amrit] Singh writes.

But it wasn't just Arar. At least seven others were rendered to Syria. Among their destinations: a prison in west Damascus called the Palestine Branch, which features an area called "the Grave," comprised of "individual cells that were roughly the size of coffins." Syrian intelligence reportedly uses something called a "German Chair" to "stretch the spine." 

Per Singh's 2013 report, the Palestine Branch Prison, or "Far Falestin," in western Damascus is where the Mukhabarat took people on behalf of the CIA. Over the weekend, my library hold for Sam Dagher's book Assad or We Burn The Country arrived. Dagher doesn't dwell on Assad's CIA cooperation, but he includes this overview:

In his [post-9/11] interactions with U.S. officials, Bashar wanted to leverage intelligence sharing on al-Qaeda to win broader bilateral cooperation with Washington. He wanted to cash in his collaboration, which by 2002 advanced beyond information. Like practically all Middle Eastern countries, Syria was part of the CIA's rendition program. 

Dagher suggests that Assad's CIA cooperation ended with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Singh's timeline supports that conclusion: The nine people (I seem to have miscounted in 2013; oops) she identifies as having been rendered to Syria were all taken there before March 2003. But I bet there's much more that we don't know about Assad and the renditions—and it's waiting, inside Far Falestin and whatever Mukhabarat headquarters was in Damascus, to come to light. 

Speaking of post-Assad Syria, on Tuesday Hayat Tahrir al-Sham's (HTS) military chief gave an interview to Agence France-Presse (AFP) that will have tremendous significance for both the Syrian Kurds and the United States. The Kurds are a proxy force for the U.S. against ISIS, and for the U.S.-backed controllers of Syria east of the Euphrates River, i.e., where the oil fields are. "The Kurdish people are one of the components of the Syrian people... Syria will not be divided and there will be no federal entities," Abu Hassan al-Hamawi told AFP. That's the clearest statement so far that the victorious HTS opposes Kurdish autonomy, something we'vebeen tracking since Aleppo fell. Ending the Kurdish autonomous zone is a cardinal strategic priority of Turkey, which guaranteed HTS' viability in Idlib for the past four years. And it raises enormous questions about the viability of the U.S. military presence in eastern Syria, which never possessed any mandate in international law, and was possible only because Assad in Damascus lacked the power to oust the Americans. At the same time, HTS, no longer a remnant of al-Qaeda, needs to remove itself from international sanctions on al-Qaeda if Syria is to rejoin the global economy, so perhaps the seeds of a deal are in place. 

Finally, I wanted to note that over the past week, the Biden administration transferred three longtime Guantanamo Bay detainees: Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, who was never charged with a crime, will go to Kenya. Mohammed Farik bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir bin Lep both pleaded guilty before the military tribunals at Guantanamo, cooperated in the Hambali military trial and will serve the remainder of their five-year sentences in Malaysia. Now 27 men remain locked inside Guantanamo Bay. 

OK, now we're coming upon my new Zeteo column, and hence, the paywall. This is going to be the second-to-last FOREVER WARS edition of 2024. I'm going to use the holiday slowdown (in readership, not in news) to work on THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN. Our last edition will come shortly after Christmas Day, since that's when IRON MAN #3 will be out, so I'll do a behind-the-scenes edition breaking down the conclusion of "The Stark-Roxxon War." As always, we appreciate your support—why not round out the year by purchasing a FOREVER WARS subscription?