Public Intelligence

Egyptian army soldiers catch a plain clothes state security policeman, center, after he was discovered by anti-Mubarak protesters in Tahrir square in Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, Feb. 5, 2011. US President Barack Obama said Egypt's Hosni Mubarak should do the statesmanlike thing and make a quick handoff to a more representative government. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

Cables: FBI trained Egypt’s state security ‘torturers’ (Raw Story):

Egypt’s secret police, long accused of torturing suspects and intimidating political opponents of President Hosni Mubarak, received training at the FBI’s facility in Quantico, Virginia, even as US diplomats compiled allegations of brutality against them, according to US State Department cables released by WikiLeaks.

One cable, dated November 2007 and published by the Telegraph, describes a meeting between the head of the SSIS, Egypt’s secret police, and FBI deputy director John Pistole, in which the secret police chief praises Pistole for the “excellent and strong” cooperation between the two agencies. (Pistole has since been appointed head of the TSA.)

SSIS chief Abdul Rahman said the FBI’s training sessions at Quantico were of “great benefit” to his agency. The cables did not address what sort of training Egyptian secret police received at Quantico, or how many officers were trained there.

In another cable, dated October 2009, a US diplomat reported on allegations from “credible human rights lawyers” that the SSIS was behind the torture of terrorism suspects held in Egyptian jails.

Members of a Hezbollah cell arrested in 2008 were tortured “with electric shocks and sleep deprivation to reduce them to a ‘zombie state’,” the cable stated. The lawyers “asserted that ‘this kind of torture’ is different from what [name redacted] normally sees, and speculated that a special branch of Interior Ministry State Security (SSIS) could be directing the torture.”

The history of torture allegations against the SSIS reaches back decades, but allegations have grown since the war on terror was launched after 9/11. In a 2007 report, Amnesty International accused the Egyptian government of turning the country into a “torture center” for war on terror suspects.

“We are now uncovering evidence of Egypt being a destination of choice for third-party or contracted-out torture in the ‘war on terror’,” Amnesty’s Kate Allen said at the time.

The Egyptian government acknowledged in 2005 that the US had transferred 60 to 70 detainees to Egypt since 2001.

FBI DEPUTY DIRECTOR MEETS WITH HEAD OF STATE SECURITY (telegraph.co.uk):

2. (C) Repeatedly during the meeting, Abdul Rahman emphasized the “excellent and strong” cooperation between SSIS and the FBI, through Embassy Cairo’s Legatt office, highlighting the “great benefit” that SSIS derives from training opportunities at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA. When Deputy Director Pistole raised the possibility of increasing information sharing of fingerprints – with the GOE to be granted access to the USG’s fingerprint databases, in return for the GOE sharing fingerprints of extremists that it has on file – Abdel Rahman was largely unresponsive. Later in the meeting, he offered that, “if you have the fingerprints or DNA samples of anyone who conducted an attack against any American anywhere, please pass it to us, and we can check our databases for information on the individuals.”

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