Outsourcing Torture

The CIA's tight relationship with Jordan's General Intelligence Department has meant that 12 individuals have been "interrogated" at the CIA's behest by the Jordanians under the Bush administration. The interrogators are torturers, according to the State Department and every other reliable source. And torturers of the most barbaric kind:

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."

Hence the Bush administration's reliance on them, I suppose. Hat tip: Jeb Koogler.