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Articles by St Clair, Jeffrey

The Mind-Breakers: the Case of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh

By Jeffrey St. Clair

 

This article originally appeared in Counterpunch on October 6, 2023. It is reprinted here with permission. Read the original at https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/06/the-mind-breakers-the-case-of-ramzi-bin-al-shibh/

 

On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) forces raided several houses in Karachi, hunting for suspected members of Al Qaeda. In one of the incursions, the Pakistanis captured a young Yemeni man named Ramzi bin Al-Shibh. Three days later, the Pakistanis turned Bin al-Shibh and Hassan bin Attash, a 17-year-old Saudi, over to the CIA, who renditioned the pair into what was known as the Dark Prison outside Kabul, where, according to an account Bin al-Shibh later gave to the International Red Cross, he was stripped of his clothes, denied food and water and kept shackled from the ceiling in a painful position for the next three days while loud music was blasted into his cell.

This was just the opening act in the prolonged torture of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh that took him to torture chambers in at least seven different countries in four years– Afghanistan, Jordan, Morocco, Poland, Gitmo, Romania, and Lithuania–and left Bin al-Shibh a broken man, psychologically shattered and physically depleted.

After four days in ...

Buddha of the Blues

Buddha of the Blues

by Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch

In the summer of 1998, Alexander Cockburn and I spent a few days in North Richmond, California, a battered industrial city just outside of Berkeley. We had just published our book Whiteout on the CIA and drug trafficking and had been ...

Tainted Plasma Traced to Arkansas Prison: Bill Clinton's Blood Trails

by Jeffrey St. Clair

The year Bill Clinton became governor of Arkansas, the Arkansas state prison board awarded a hefty contract to a Little Rock company called Health Management Associates (HMA). The company got $3 million a year to run medical services for the state's awful prison system, which had ...