The Center for Public Integrity

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.

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.

One of the most significant fallouts from the U.S. war on terror has been the strain on America's historically strong relationship with Europe.

Allegations of secret CIA prisons in Europe and European governments' complicity with the kidnappings of terror suspects (known as "extraordinary renditions") have irritated trans-Atlantic relations, stressed the NATO alliance and jeopardized U.S. national security priorities, including maintaining an international coalition in Iraq.

Allegations began to surface about secret CIA prisons in Europe in late 2005, after the Washington Post revealed the existence of "black site" prisons there. By the time the European Parliament released its initial findings about the covert program in June 2006, European public outcry was swift and shrill.

"Bush exposes not only his own previous lies," said Sarah Ludford, a British member of the European Parliament, "he also exposes to ridicule those arrogant government leaders in Europe who dismissed as unfounded our fears about extraordinary rendition." In that practice, military or intelligence agents operating outside the normal judicial system seize terrorist suspects and spirit them away for questioning in secret locations, often to countries known to employ torture.

Evidence of covert cooperation between the CIA and European intelligence agencies continued to mount. Revelations about the involvement of Italian intelligence services in the abduction of Egyptian-born cleric Abu Omar off the streets of Milan shook the Italian government and has led to the indictment of half a dozen Italian officers as well as 26 Americans. It also led to a constitutional crisis in Italy, with the government claiming that state secrets should trump the judicial investigation and prevent disclosure of documents that could confirm Italian complicity in the CIA kidnapping. 

PORTSMOUTH, England — When a conservative talk-show host from radio station WDAY in Fargo, N.D., recorded an interview with Vice President Cheney in late October 2006, the broadcaster was just a small fish in a vast ocean of airwaves. Big scoops rarely came his way. Scott Hennen had interviewed Cheney several times for his weekday "Hot Talk" program but never before in the West Wing of the White House during the run-up to major midterm elections.

Cheney sat at a corner of his large desk as Hennen held out a microphone bearing WDAY's logo. They talked easily about the elections, Iraq and "dunking a terrorist in water." Hennen concluded the interview with a folksy question about the vice president's fondness for pheasant hunting: "There's some great bird hunting in North Dakota. Is this going to be the year you come up and do a little bird hunting in North Dakota?"

Whether either man fully grasped what the vice president had acknowledged — that al Qaeda detainees had received "a dunk in water" — may never be known. Cheney had let slip something that no other member of the U.S. government had dared confirm. The significance of his words became clear the next day when the Washington bureau of the McClatchy News Service obtained a transcript and ran a story saying, "Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaeda suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called 'waterboarding,' which creates the sensation of drowning."

Hennen had casually introduced the subject, claiming on behalf of his listeners: "We're all for it, if it saves American lives." Seconds later, he asked Cheney outright: "Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?"

There is no single, accepted definition of the terms “foreign aid” or even “foreign military aid” or “military assistance.” For a government as large as that of the United States, it’s virtually impossible to track all of the various federal agencies’ programs across countries and sectors to arrive at a single number that captures the true amount of U.S. taxpayer dollars going to foreign governments, or even just their militaries.

For the “Collateral Damage” investigative study, the Center for Public Integrity created a database that tracks a subset of those financial flows: taxpayer-funded programs or assistance that contribute to a nation’s offensive military capabilities. The database does not include certain large nuclear non-proliferation programs or expenditures such as Foreign Military Sales or Direct Commercial Sales, which are not supported directly with taxpayer dollars. The database is also limited to tracking funds appropriated to either the Defense Department or the State Department. For this report, these are the criteria for “foreign military assistance” or “foreign military aid.”

Funds appropriated to the State Department and Defense Department represent the vast majority of unclassified military aid and assistance. This report does not attempt to track smaller overseas programs where funding is appropriated to the Justice Department, Drug Enforcement Agency, or Department of Homeland Security. The public does not have any way of tracking classified programs administered by the U.S. intelligence community. These classified programs likely command large amounts of funding, especially after the 9/11 attacks, and oversight is limited to members of congressional intelligence committees.

Programs included in the Center’s database:

Coalition Support Funds (CSF): created after 9/11 to reimburse key allied countries for providing assistance to the U.S. in the global war on terror.