Jabour made the mistake of befriending an assortment of wounded, destitute ex-comrades who wandered into Pakistan after the conflict, his affidavit goes on. In 2004, he says, Pakistani intelligence agents forced him and a friend into a car, put hoods on their heads and took them to a facility in Lahore where Jabour was beaten and tortured for several days before his captors handed him over to the Americans.
He then describes a haze of sedative injections and a jet ride. Jabour found himself in a nameless facility where he says men in black uniforms and masks stripped off Jabour’s clothes, bound him, and put him in a tiny cell with a bucket for a toilet. He remained naked and bound for three months, with a video camera suspended from the ceiling watching his every move. Outside, large speakers played jet engine noises.
According to Jabour’s affidavit, a US interrogator told him that “whenever you hear this sound, you will remember why you are here”—a reference to the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
After interrogators questioned Jabour, he related, they would throw him back in his cell, tie him in various uncomfortable positions and then subject him to loud noises and music, sometimes for up to four days at a time. “I would scream for them to stop…and I would tell them I was going to talk,” he says. On other occasions, he says in the affidavit, interrogators tied a rope to his handcuffs and lifted him up for several minutes at a time or squeezed him in a tiny closet that had breathing holes punched in the door (he would later tell human rights advocates and journalists that he was threatened only with being put in the closet).
By the time a year had passed, the affidavit goes on, the severity of Jabour’s treatment eased somewhat. He was still subjected to interrogations, but he was in a larger cell and his captors let him out occasionally to watch documentary films on DVD or to take books out of the facility’s library, which had thousands of books in Arabic and other languages. Eventually, they gave him a drawing pad and an electronic chessboard.
By then, apparently, the United States had decided that Jabour either had no more useful information to offer or was too small of a catch to bother keeping in custody. In July 2006, a clerk at the facility suddenly told Jabour that he was about to be transferred. “Where to?” Jabour asked. The American, the affidavit says, told him he didn’t know. The next day, guards came to Jabour’s cell, bound him in chains, taped cotton over his eyes and put plugs in his ears. He says he was driven to an airport, loaded on another jet and injected with something that made him lose consciousness.
After the jet landed hours later, Jabour reports that he was carried into a building. When his blindfold was removed, he was in a room with portraits of King Hussein and King Abdullah on the wall. Jabour was back in Jordan, the land of his birth. Jordanian agents began questioning him, he says, but the sessions were less brutal. “The interrogators told me they know everything I’ve been through,” he says. For the first time, he was allowed to meet with a Red Cross representative. He also was allowed to see his parents and other relatives.
But instead of releasing Jabour, the Jordanians turned the former US prisoner over to the Israelis. While US interrogators reportedly have used the threat of rendition to Israel to frighten captives into talking, Jabour says that after a humiliating initial search (in which he was stripped and forced to squat several times), the Israelis didn’t treat him quite as roughly as the Americans had. He relates that he was questioned by a Shabak interrogator named Levi, who talked to him roughly a dozen times, three to four hours each time. Levi had Jabour tell his life story, while Levi took notes on a computer. None of the questions had anything to do with Israel or its national security, Jabour recalled in the affidavit.
