Middle East

The price of independence: $1 billion

By Marina Walker Guevara

Despite an offer of $6 billion in cash from the United States in the weeks leading up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, the Turkish Parliament voted against allowing U.S. troops to use Turkish territory as a base for launching a northern front against Iraq.

With that rejection, the United States quickly learned that Turkey was no longer the predictable NATO ally of the Cold War years. Many in Washington were outraged, including then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who later blamed Ankara's lack of cooperation for some of the subsequent U.S. misfortunes in Iraq.

The grant resulted in part from an aggressive lobbying campaign headed by a former speaker of the House of Representatives, Louisiana Republican Bob Livingston, whose lobbying firm has represented the Turkish government since 2000 for an annual retainer of $1.8 million, Department of Justice records show. However, that didn't slow down the Washington lobbyists for the Turkish government, and it certainly didn't stop the flow of U.S. funds to a country with a long history of human rights abuses. In 2003 Congress appropriated a $1 billion grant to Turkey as a disincentive, in part, for Ankara to unilaterally invade northern Iraq, where Turkey has fought its own war against the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) for many years.

As war preparations were under way, many in Congress were disappointed that Turkey was unwilling to let the United States use Turkey as a staging ground for an invasion of Iraq. Former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a California Republican now serving time in prison for an unrelated bribery conviction, introduced an amendment that would have deleted the proposed $1 billion Economic Support Fund grant to Turkey from the 2003 war supplemental bill.

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Middle East

An interrogation role model

By Yossi Melman

The King Hussein bridge is the most direct route from Amman to Jerusalem, but it was not a trip Marwan Ibrahim Mahmoud Jabour wanted to make — he had no choice. It was September 2006, and Jabour, a 30-year-old Jordanian engineer who says he made the mistake of going to Afghanistan in a fruitless attempt to join the jihad, had spent the last two years as a U.S. prisoner — possibly in Afghanistan but he wasn't sure, since his captors had never revealed the location.

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Middle East

Renditions vs. rights

By Marina Walker Guevara

Jordan, according to a U.S. State Department request that Congress appropriate the country nearly $500 million in 2007 military aid, continues "to lead the way as a regional model for democracy, good governance, economic reform, and tolerance."

Jordan, according to the State Department's 2005 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, has police and security forces that "allegedly abused detainees during detention and interrogation and reportedly also used torture." The U.N. special rapporteur on torture said in June 2006 that torture is "systematically practiced" at prisons run by the Jordanian intelligence agency.

Jordan, according to Amnesty International, is a "key hub" in the United States' secret program of "extraordinary rendition," in which terrorism suspects are kidnapped and flown to secret prisons or to countries known for torture.

The Kingdom of Jordan, long a U.S. ally, is a tangle of internal contradictions — and since 9/11, U.S.-Jordan counterterrorism efforts have made the tangle even knottier.

A major ingredient of this foreign policy stew is Jordan's strategic placement on the world map: It shares borders with both Iraq and Israel, as well as with Syria and Saudi Arabia. Another major ingredient is Jordan's historically consistent pro-U.S. foreign policy.

ICIJ's database of U.S. military assistance, compiled from data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, shows that in the three years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Jordan received $2.7 billion in military aid from the U.S. government, a 170 percent increase from the roughly $1 billion it received in the three years prior to the attacks; it is now the fourth-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, after Israel, Egypt and Pakistan. Jordan was also one of the countries that the United States reimbursed, with little congressional oversight, for its help in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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