Archive for May, 2009

NOTE January 24, 2016: Following persistent harassment from Google because of the ads I host, which, hilariously, make me almost no money whatsoever, I have removed the three images that were on this page. Google stated, “Google does not allow the monetization of content that may be sensitive, tragic, or hurtful. While we believe strongly in the freedom of expression and offer broad access to content across the Web without censoring search results, we reserve the right to exercise discretion when reviewing sites and determining whether or not we are able to provide a positive user experience delivering contextually targeted ads to a site with this type of content.” It was stated that I could remove the ad’s code from the page, but I didn’t know how to do that on a page by page basis. If you still want to see images from Abu Ghraib, follow the link below.

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Below are three photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, from the website of the Sydney Morning Herald, which made them available in 2006, and from Britain’s Daily Telegraph. The photos relate to President Obama’s recent decision to back down, at the last minute, from a promise to comply with a court order demanding the release, by May 28, of 44 photos of the abuse of prisoners in various locations in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the Guardian noted last month, the photos confirm that “abuse was much more widespread than the US has so far been prepared to admit,” and even though these photos are not thought to be part of the 44 photos in question, it is believed that they constitute part of the 2,000 photos that the government was also “processing for release” at the time, according to the Justice Department.

Announcing his decision, Obama said that the photos in question were “not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.” This may be so, but we will never know if they are not made available, and in any case, as the Daily Telegraph reported, the photographs “reportedly show military guards threatening to sexually assault a detainee with a broomstick and hooded prisoners on transport planes with Playboy magazines opened to pictures of nude women on their laps,” which, though not as vile as the Abu Ghraib photos, could certainly be regarded as “sensational.”

Obama’s main point, however, was spelled out when he added that “the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

In response, Anthony D. Romero, the President of the ACLU, which has been campaigning since 2003 for the release of the photos, made the following statement:

The Obama administration’s adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president’s stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government. This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department’s failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.

It is true that these photos would be disturbing; the day we are no longer disturbed by such repugnant acts would be a sad one. In America, every fact and document gets known — whether now or years from now. And when these photos do see the light of day, the outrage will focus not only on the commission of torture by the Bush administration but on the Obama administration’s complicity in covering them up. Any outrage related to these photos should be due not to their release but to the very crimes depicted in them. Only by looking squarely in the mirror, acknowledging the crimes of the past and achieving accountability can we move forward and ensure that these atrocities are not repeated.

If the Obama administration continues down this path, it will betray not only its promises to the American people, but its commitment to this nation’s most fundamental principles. President Obama has said we should turn the page, but we cannot do that until we fully learn how this nation veered down the path of criminality and immorality, who allowed that to happen and whose lives were mutilated as a result. Releasing these photos — as painful as it might be — is a critical step toward that accounting. The American people deserve no less.

Both sides, I believe, have a point, but in reviewing whether or not to post these particular images, I decided that it was worth publishing them for three reasons:

1: As a reminder of what happens when military personnel, who are trained to obey orders, are ordered to disregard the Geneva Conventions and to indulge in sadistic behavior as part of their instructions to “soften up the detainees” for interrogation.

2: As a reminder that the acts depicted were not the rogue activities of “a few bad apples” (as Bush administration officials maintained, and as President Obama also attempted to claim, when he said that “the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals”), but were part of a deliberate policy, inspired by the US military’s SERE program and authorized at the highest levels of the Bush administration — and, in particular by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — in which the use of torture and abuse as part of the Standard Operating Procedure was authorized in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo. The photos I have chosen — featuring nudity, sexual humiliation, hooding, painful shackling and the use of dogs to terrify detainees — are typical of the techniques used widely in the “War on Terror.”

3: As a reminder that, although Barack Obama pledged, in an Executive Order issued on his second day in office, that the questioning of prisoners by any US government agency must follow the interrogation guidelines laid down in the Army Field Manual, which guarantees humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions, his government has appealed a ruling by Judge John D. Bates, granting habeas corpus rights to foreign prisoners subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and held in the US-run prison in Bagram, Afghanistan.

The administration’s determination to maintain a regime of total secrecy at Bagram does nothing to convince me that, beyond his rhetoric about embracing the Geneva Conventions, Obama has actually insisted that Donald Rumsfeld’s brutal innovations are thoroughly repudiated, that prisoners seized in wartime will genuinely be protected once more by the Geneva Conventions, and that copies of the Geneva Conventions will be prominently displayed in any interrogation setting, as they were before the Bush administration began its journey to the “Dark Side.”

For more on the story, see Documents Describe Prisoner Abuse Photos Obama is Withholding on The Public Record, and for extensive galleries of previously released photos, see two articles at Salon, here and here.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For other articles on Abu Ghraib, see: Remember Abu Ghraib? (a review of Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Film Review: Standard Operating Procedure (a review of Errol Morris’ challenging documentary about the scandal) (July 2008), In the Guardian: The 5th anniversary of the Abu Ghraib scandal (April 2009).

For other articles on Iraq, see: Book Review: Road From Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía (January 2008), Iraq’s refugees in Syria: Mike Otterman reports (February 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Refuting Cheney’s Lies: The Stories of Six Prisoners Released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison (May 2009), Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (May 2009), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq (May 2009), Cheney’s Lies Undermined By Iraq Interrogator Matthew Alexander (May 2009).

Since the story first broke, last Sunday, of the death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Bush administration’s most famous “ghost prisoner,” and the source of a tortured lie that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq, numerous websites have been running a photo, purportedly of al-Libi, which is, in fact, a picture of Abu Faraj al-Libi, a little-known “high-value detainee” in Guantánamo, also previously held in secret prisons run by the CIA, who was seized in Mardan, Pakistan, on May 2, 2005.

To correct this widespread misunderstanding, here, courtesy of the British human rights group Cageprisoners, is a photograph of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi:

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For other recent articles on Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, his torture, Cheney’s lies, and the dubious relationship between Libya and the US and UK governments, see: Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq and In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here).

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

I don’t normally cross-post other articles, but this short response to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s call to release classified memos which, he suggested, would show the success of the Bush administration’s torture program, succinctly demolishes Cheney’s claims. It’s written by Matthew Alexander, the principled interrogator in Iraq who chose to play by the rules, rather than embracing Cheney’s “Dark Side” (and later wrote an excellent book about his experiences), and was originally posted on VetVoice.

If We’re Going to Reveal More Memos …

Former VP Dick Cheney has requested the release of additional memos showing that torture and abuse saved American lives by preventing terrorist attacks. If the Obama administration decides to release these memos, then I suggest they also release statistics from Iraq showing the number of foreign fighters that were recruited because of our policy of torture and abuse. It was tracked. I know because I saw the slides and because I heard captured foreign fighters state this day in and day out. The government can also release the statistics that show that 90% of suicide bombers in Iraq were these same foreign fighters. These foreign fighters killed hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers.

After these revelations, Americans can judge whether or not a policy of torture and abuse kept us safe. Unfortunately, we’ll never be able to evaluate the damage that was done to past or future interrogations. As I experienced firsthand, detainees were less likely to cooperate when they viewed us as hypocrites. We can’t establish the trust that is required to convince a detainee to cooperate unless we live up to the principles that we preach.

I had one detainee in Iraq, a previous al-Qaeda fighter, who provided me with all the information he knew willingly without me having to run an interrogation approach. He told me that al-Qaeda had accused him of being a mole and tortured him before we rescued him. He then proceeded to say that the reason he was going to cooperate was because we didn’t torture him and because of that, he knew everything that he’d been told about us by al-Qaeda was wrong.

Before 9/11, the protection of American soldiers from terrorist attacks was a priority for our country. Consider our responses to the Beirut Bombing, Khobar Towers, and the USS Cole. When we talk about keeping Americans safe from terrorist attacks, we need to include all Americans, especially those that serve in uniform.

Matthew Alexander spent fourteen years in the US Air Force and Air Force Reserves. An “investigator turned interrogator” who deployed to Iraq in 2006, he conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than 1,000. Alexander was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for his achievements in leading the team that located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed by Coalition Forces. He is the author of How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For more on Matthew Alexander, see these articles in Harper’s and the Washington Post.

For the Guardian’s Comment is free, “Death in Libya, betrayal in the West” is an article I wrote in response to news of the death, in a Libyan jail, of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. A prisoner of the “War on Terror,” who was subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture for four years before being returned to Libya in 2006, al-Libi’s role in the sordid saga of the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks is particularly significant, because in early 2002, while being tortured in Egypt, he came up with an allegation about a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Since breaking al-Libi’s story in the Western media on Sunday evening, I have written several articles examining the story from various angles — in particular, was he killed, or did he commit suicide, and why was the mainstream media so slow to pick up on the story? — but for the Guardian I thought it was significant to focus on how Libyan prisoners seized by the US in the “War on Terror,” or those who fled Libya seeking asylum in the UK, have become pawns in a political game.

This little-noticed story, which I touched on in my article, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence? has manifested itself as both countries have repatriated former prisoners and asylum seekers to face torture and show trials — or have attempted to do so — not because of the threat that they pose to the US and the UK, but as part of a morally bankrupt deal that followed Colonel Gaddafi’s pragmatic renunciation of terrorism in 2003, when he suddenly became a friend of the West, and his opponents were transformed, overnight, from freedom fighters to terrorists.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For other recent articles on Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — and Cheney’s monstrous and unprecedented crime — see: Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA), and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), linearization transfer characteristic mach-zehnder modulatorSecret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval (all April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

The reawakening of the biggest scandal in the whole of the Bush administration’s bleak and brutal tenure — the fact that prisoners in the “War on Terror” were tortured not to protect America, but to find excuses to justify the invasion of Iraq — began three weeks ago, with a surprising revelation in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report into detainee abuse (PDF), and a McClatchy Newspapers report by Jonathan Landay, but yesterday it stepped up after Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show.

In a blog post for the Washington Note, Wilkerson explained that he had been so appalled by recent tapes of former Vice President Dick Cheney “extolling the virtues of harsh interrogation, torture, and his leadership,” which had been played in the run-up to his interview, that when he got home, reflecting on how everything he had heard had been “stunningly inaccurate,” he “thought long and hard about what I knew at this point in my investigations with respect to the former VP’s office.”

His conclusions were stark. All Cheney’s talk about keeping America safe, and claiming that President Obama is endangering the US by abandoning the use of “the Cheney method of interrogation and torture” is nonsense, Wilkerson wrote, for a variety of generally sound reasons that can be gleaned from the post.

These, however, were the crucial passages:

[W]hat I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion — its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the US but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

As Bob Fertik noted on Democrats.com, this is extraordinarily important for three particular reasons: firstly, because of Wilkerson’s credibility — and his access to certain privileged information during the Bush years; secondly, because he states that “the desire to manufacture an Iraq-al-Qaeda link was the principal priority — not secondary to preventing another attack,” and thirdly because, reinforcing conclusions I reached in two recent articles, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low, Wilkerson stated that “the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion” — specifically, the memos purporting to redefine torture and authorize its use by the CIA, which were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel on August 1, 2002.

To recap, while I wait to see what impact Wilkerson’s revelations will have, these are the steps that led us to the reawakening of the Iraq-al-Qaeda torture story:

In the Senate report, released on April 21, Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist with the Army’s 85th Medical Detachment’s Combat Stress Control Team, who said that, with two colleagues, he was “hijacked” into providing an advisory role to the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo, stated that “a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

The day after, Jonathan Landay picked up on Burney’s comments, and talked to a “former senior US intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue,” who told him that Vice President Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld “demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al-Qaeda-Iraq collaboration.”

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the official explained. “The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there. There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder. Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA … and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

He added, however, that senior officials in the administration “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information.”

Since April 22, numerous commentators, myself included, have probed the story further, establishing that torture clearly began before August 1, 2002, for example, and recalling that, last December, former Pentagon analysts told Vanity Fair’s David Rose that Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “senior al-Qaeda operative,” whose torture (as Wilkerson confirmed) began in April 2002, was also tortured to produce information about connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

However, an even more significant story concerned another “high-value detainee” mentioned by Wilkerson: Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of the Khaldan training camp, who was seized in December 2001 and sent to be tortured in Egypt in February 2002. It was there that al-Libi made the false confession about al-Qaeda operatives receiving information about chemical and biological weapons from Saddam Hussein that was used by Colin Powell in February 2003, in an attempt to encourage the UN to approve the forthcoming invasion of Iraq, and it was al-Libi’s death last Sunday in a Libyan prison that brought the full horror of this story back to life.

Unlike 14 other “high-value detainees” — including Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — who were transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, al-Libi never made it to Guantánamo, and was, instead, rendered back to Libya by an administration that not only had no further use for him, but also wanted to make sure that his secrets would remain hidden forever.

His death, two weeks after representatives of Human Rights Watch tried — and failed — to talk to him in Tripoli’s Abu Salim jail, and as Abu Zubaydah’s US attorney, Brent Mickum, had begun to make tentative attempts to communicate with him, is therefore remarkably suspicious. The Libyan authorities claimed that he committed suicide, but as I explained in two previous articles, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence? and Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, this is highly unlikely, and it is far more probable that Colonel Gaddafi had him killed because he too was threatened by what al-Libi could have revealed about his long years of torture, the relationship between the US and Libyan governments, and the lies he told in prisons around the world.

Whatever the truth about al-Libi’s death, it should not blind us to the fact that, as far as America is concerned — and as Lawrence Wilkerson has just reiterated so forcefully — the most urgent response to his death must be to confront Dick Cheney — and, it should be noted, Donald Rumsfeld — with the evidence of their extraordinary and unprecedented betrayal, not only of America’s values, but of the American people themselves.

As Paul Krugman explained in the New York Times on April 22, in an opinion piece that should really have been emblazoned on the front page,

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

POSTSCRIPT: So Marcy’s all over this story at Empty Wheel, picking up on the fact that Lawrence Wilkerson noted that al-Libi was waterboarded in Egypt, and proposing that “Wilkerson is stating, clearly, that in early 2002, Dick Cheney ordered Ibn Shaykh al-Libi to be tortured even after the interrogation team reported that al-Libi was compliant.”

I’m not entirely sure that it’s correct to infer that Cheney had any direct contact with al-Libi’s Egyptian torturers, and I also agree with several readers who have noted that it’s unclear who the “compliant” detainee was whose further torture was ordered by Cheney — but it seems apparent to me that this other detainee is not al-Libi.

I’m also struggling to understand the timeline. Al-Libi’s lies about Iraq were first noted by the Defense Intelligence Agency on February 22, but Wilkerson confidently stated that “the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002.” I’m inclined to think that al-Libi’s torture regarding Iraq actually continued for many months in Egypt, before someone — Cheney, I presume — was happy with it, and that therefore the “compliant” detainee, sometime in April or May 2002, was Zubaydah.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For another article about Lawrence Wilkerson, see: Lawrence Wilkerson Tells The Truth About Guantánamo, and for updates on the al-Libi/Libya story, see In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA), and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), linearization transfer characteristic mach-zehnder modulatorSecret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval (all April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

David Remes, an attorney for 16 Yemeni prisoners in Guantánamo, claimed today that the government’s detention policy was “in tatters,” after District Court Judge Gladys Kessler (photo, left) comprehensively demolished the Justice Department’s case against a Yemeni prisoner held in Guantánamo without charge or trial for seven years (PDF).

Judge Kessler ruled last Monday that the government had failed to establish, “by a preponderance of the evidence,” that Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed was “part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaeda forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” and stated that the government “should take all necessary diplomatic steps to facilitate“ his release.

This was not the first time that a judge had ordered a prisoner freed from Guantánamo because of the weakness of the government’s evidence. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the prisoners’ habeas corpus rights last June, judges have ordered the release of 25 prisoners in the 29 cases that have so far been heard.

However, although Judge Richard Leon dismissed the testimony of two witnesses in Guantánamo four months ago in the case of the Saudi resident and Chadian national Mohammed El-Gharani, stating that “the credibility and reliability of the detainees being relied upon by the government has either been directly called into question by government personnel or has been characterized by government personnel as undermined,” last week’s 45-page ruling reveals (despite extensive redactions) that Judge Kessler expressed even more comprehensive doubts about both the reliability of witnesses in Guantánamo, and the overall quality of the government’s supposed evidence. This will, I believe, have a knock-on effect on other cases, and may well be causing tremors of fear in those parts of the Justice Department and the Pentagon where, bizarrely, all indications suggest that, despite the change of administration, career officials who worked under George W. Bush are behaving as though it is still business as usual.

The case against Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed

Ali Ahmed, who was seized, with at least 15 other prisoners, in a raid on a house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002 (on the same night that the alleged senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was captured in another house raid), has always stated that he traveled to Pakistan “in order to find a religious school at which to study the Koran,” as Judge Kessler described it, and “denies ever going to Afghanistan, training at an al-Qaeda camp, fighting against anyone, or being a member of a terrorist group.”

In a military review board at Guantánamo in 2007, he explained that he traveled to Pakistan, on a one-month visa, “to learn the Koran so he could be a teacher,” but ended up stuck in the guest house “because the situation at that time was they were arresting any Arab that was found there in Pakistan so we were just sitting and waiting in that house.”

In its case against him, the government drew on allegations made by four prisoners in Guantánamo, and also attempted to rely on a “mosaic theory” of intelligence. As Judge Kessler described it, drawing on documents submitted by the government,

[the] theory is that each of these allegations — and even the individual pieces of evidence supporting these allegations — should not be examined in isolation. Rather, “[t]he probity of any single piece of evidence should  be evaluated based on the evidence as a whole,” to determine whether, when considered “as a whole,” the evidence supporting these allegations comes together to create a “mosaic” that shows the Petitioner to be justifiably detained.

Judge Kessler then noted that, although it “may well be true” that “use of the mosaic approach is a common and well-established mode of analysis in the intelligence community … at this point in this long, drawn-out litigation the Court’s obligation is to make findings of fact and conclusions of law” to consider the government’s case. After pointing out that the mosaic theory “is only as persuasive as the tiles which compose it and the glue which binds them together,” she then proceeded to highlight a catalog of deficiencies in the tiles and the glue.

Judge Kessler dismisses the testimony of four witnesses

Dealing first with the witnesses, she excluded the testimony of the first, “whose credibility has been cast into serious doubt — and rejected” by Judge Leon in the case of Mohammed El-Gharani. Noting that he “has made accusations against a number of detainees” at Guantánamo, and that “Many of those accusations have been called into question by the government,” Judge Kessler dismissed his claim that he “overheard” conversations at Guantánamo about Ali Ahmed’s travels in Afghanistan, stating that, “In addition to coming from an unreliable witness,” it was “based upon multiple levels of hearsay.”

Judge Kessler then dismissed the testimony of a second witness, whose allegation was redacted, because he had made several contradictory statements to interrogators, and, moreover, because his allegation was “riddled … with equivocation and speculation,” and also dismissed the account of a third witness, who claimed to have seen Ali Ahmed while he was allegedly being smuggled from Afghanistan to Pakistan, because, as Ali Ahmed stated, he “has been diagnosed by military medical staff as having a ‘psychosis.’”

Judge Kessler was particularly troubled that Ali Ahmed “learned of the witness’ medical condition only through the diligent work of his counsel, and not as a result of the government’s obligation to provide him exculpatory information.” She was also unimpressed that the witness provided “inconsistent identifications,” and was concerned by “evidence that [he] underwent torture,” at Bagram and in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” near Kabul, “which may well have affected the accuracy of the information he supplied to interrogators.”

According to the government, the last witness, identified as al-Qahtani (probably Jabran al-Qahtani, an alleged al-Qaeda operative who was captured with Abu Zubaydah), identified Ali Ahmed, from a photograph shown to him in Bagram, as someone who had received military training near Kabul. However, Judge Kessler dismissed this statement when it became apparent that, in Bagram, where Ali Ahmed had been given the prisoner number 191, the government admitted that two detainees were given this same number,” and she therefore concluded that it was “completely unclear” to whom the allegation referred.

Judge Kessler dismisses the “mosaic” theory of intelligence

While the dismissal of all four witnesses’ statements fatally undermined the government’s case, Judge Kessler also took apart the “mosaic theory” conjured up from the prisoners’ statements, which purported to show that Ali Ahmed trained and fought in Afghanistan, and was associated with al-Qaeda because of his presence in the guest house in Faisalabad.

Dismissing the claim that he fought in Afghanistan, Judge Kessler noted that, bizarrely, the government asked that his “participation in battle be inferred from a web of statements made by witnesses who were commenting on [his] non-military activity,” by suggesting that military activity could be inferred because the witnesses claimed that Ali Ahmed undertook military training in Afghanistan and “stayed in the company of al-Qaeda fighters,” and “because Ali Ahmed’s denial of such behavior is not credible.”

Noting that “The government’s position on this charge rests on its mosaic theory,” Judge Kessler added decisively, “The theory cannot support the charge,” and proceeded to explain that it was “extremely significant” that there was “absolutely no ‘direct’ evidence, at whatever hearsay level, of Ali Ahmed’s participation in battle.” She also made the following withering dismissal of the government’s claims:

Even if the evidence is to be believed that Petitioner’s story is false and that he was in Afghanistan, there simply is no affirmative proof that he took up arms. The Court will not make the leap that the government does.

After dismissing other pieces of the mosaic that dealt with Ali Ahmed’s purported military training in Afghanistan, and his supposed use of a particular kunya (nickname), for reasons connected to the unreliable witnesses discussed above, Judge Kessler also refused to accept that, because Ali Ahmed stayed at a guest house in Faisalabad, which, according to the government, housed at least a few individuals who “were involved with terrorist groups,” it was logical to infer, as “one more piece of the mosaic,” that he was “a substantial supporter of al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban, as well as a trainee and fighter for one or both of these groups.”

Reiterating her profound doubts about the witnesses, she stated that the government’s allegation was “not the material of which a reliable hearsay identification is made. Once those pieces of the mosaic have been removed because of their unreliability, the government is left with what is essentially a charge of guilt by association.”

She added,

The problem with this charge is that there is no solid evidence that Ali Ahmed engaged in, or planned, any future wrongdoing while [redacted]. There is no evidence that he was arrested with any weapons or other terrorist paraphernalia; nothing of this kind was found in his locker. Though others at the house admitted their affiliation with al-Qaeda, they did not implicate Ali Ahmed in any terrorist activity.

She also noted that there was “ample evidence in the record to indicate that guest houses are common features of the region, serving as way stations for impoverished young men spending time away from home,” and — in a comment that is worth noting in the cases of the other men seized in the house, whom I discussed in my book The Guantánamo Files, and in an article last December — stated, “It is likely, based on evidence in the record, that at least a majority of the [redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was located close to a university,” and added that she thought it significant that, “even though the police arrested all of the [redacted] men staying at the house, they appeared to have ignored [redacted], the man who operated the house.”

This was a valid point, as the house owner, Issa, was a Pakistani, and, as many Guantánamo prisoners seized in Pakistan have attested (see, for example, the story of two Sudanese prisoners released in 2007), the Pakistani police often made a point of apologizing to foreign Muslims as they were captured, stating that they had to seize foreign Arabs — but not, by inference, Pakistanis — to please the Bush administration.

In conclusion, Judge Kessler provided a succinct recap of her response to the government’s evidence, which should leave no one in any doubt about the extent of the administration’s failure to create a convincing case out of selection of profoundly dubious witnesses, and a “mosaic” with more holes than tiles:

As to the claim of participating in fighting, the government produced virtually no credible evidence; as to the claim of receiving military training, the conclusory nine-word hearsay statement by [redacted] does not show that it is more likely than not that he received such training; as to the claim that he traveled around Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 in the company of terrorist fighters fleeing the battlefield, even if the government had proven this charge, which it did not, such a fact would not constitute substantial support; as to the evidence that he stayed at [redacted], the government has certainly proven that he stayed there, but has utterly failed to present evidence that he was a substantial supporter of al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban while he did stay there; as to the government’s position about the significance of locating Petitioner’s alleged kunya on a list, the Court finds this argument without any merit whatsoever.

The long reach of Judge Kessler’s ruling

As a result, Judge Kessler’s ruling casts serious doubts on the wisdom of pursuing the cases of the other men seized in the house, except, perhaps, for those few who, as the government described it, “admitted to fighting with enemy forces” — although even these bold statements may prove, under scrutiny, to be rather less clear-cut.

Moreover, her unwavering condemnation of four separate witnesses, including one who was responsible for making unreliable allegations against dozens of prisoners (which still seem to be included as part of the government’s “evidence” against these men), and her equally unwavering condemnation of a “mosaic” of intelligence composed of second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions, have repercussions that extend far beyond the case of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed and the other Faisalabad guest house prisoners.

As David Remes explained to me, “Judge Kessler’s opinion exposes the flimsiness of the government’s evidence and blows a hole in many of the government’s cases. Specifically, the court rejected the government’s reliance on guilt-by-association and accusers of dubious reliability. These are two of the pillars of the government’s cases against many if not most of the prisoners. The opinion also shows that the courts will not give the government the unquestioning deference it has been counting on to win its cases. If the other judges of the court should apply the opinion in their cases, the government’s claims of detention authority will lie in tatters.”

If justice is indeed to be delivered to the Guantánamo prisoners, through a legal process that has taken many long years to establish, and is not to be hijacked instead by the Obama administration’s Executive review (which, noticeably, sidelines Congress and the judiciary in a manner that recalls the Bush years), I foresee that the release of many other prisoners will be ordered by judges in the coming months.

The government’s failure to comprehend the scale of the Bush administration’s cruelty and ineptitude

As a result, the administration might want to reflect on its reasons for claiming, as defense secretary Robert Gates stated two weeks ago, that there are 50 to 100 of the remaining 241 prisoners “who we cannot release and cannot try,” and who, it was suggested, might be held under some new kind of legislation authorizing preventive detention. If many of these cases are looked at closely enough, I suspect that it will be become apparent that the reasons that the government does not want to put them forward for trial is because the evidence against them is unreliable (in other words, that it was obtained through the use of torture, coercion or bribery), and that, moreover, much of it is composed of exactly the sort of “mosaic” of intelligence that, under close scrutiny, is revealed to be full of holes.

In addition, Attorney General Eric Holder would do well to focus significant attention on the pending habeas cases, and, preferably, to drop those which are infected by the testimony of liars (whether coerced or bribed) and are composed of broken “mosaics” of intelligence that will not convince judges seeking “findings of fact and conclusions of law.”

No one in the Obama administration should be surprised that so many of the Guantánamo cases will not stand up in a court of law, but I find myself surprised that senior officials seem to have been content to let a Bush-era approach to prosecution survive unchanged in the offices of the Justice Department and the Pentagon. Perhaps they haven’t been informed that the reason that there is no case against most of these men is because torture, coercion and bribery were used to fill in the blanks when the majority of these men were sold to the US military by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, who handed them over with a smile, and a simple phrase, “This man is an al-Qaeda/Taliban fighter. You owe me $5,000.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on the Huffington Post, Antiwar.com, CounterPunch and ZNet. Also cross-posted on Common Dreams.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009). Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009).

After I picked up on the breaking story of the death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi on Sunday evening (with follow-up articles here and here), there was considerable interest from bloggers, including, in particular, the Brad Blog and Empty Wheel at Firedoglake, before the mainstream media finally picked up on it.

It remains to be seen whether the most crucial aspects of the story that impact on American audiences — al-Libi’s tortured lies that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, and the wider question of diplomatic arrangements that involved Libyan prisoners seized by the CIA being rendered back to Libya — will survive an initial flurry of headlines, but on the question of al-Libi’s death, and whether it was, in fact, suicide, as the Libyan authorities claim, two experts have weighed in with their opinions, and both follow a line that accords with the opinion of Human Rights Watch, whose researchers fleetingly met al-Libi in a prison courtyard two weeks ago, and stated that he “looked well.”

The Associated Press spoke to Yasser al-Sirri, an Egyptian exile who runs the Islamic Observation Centre in London, who confirmed, as a source of mine informed me yesterday, that, on Sunday evening, the Libyan authorities had contacted al-Libi’s family and requested them to come and collect his body. Al-Sirri added that al-Libi was buried in Ajdabiya the following day, and told the AP that he doubted that he had committed suicide, as he was a “true Muslim and Islam prohibits committing suicides.”

Newsweek added further details, reporting that Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of the Gaddafi regime, also doubted that al-Libi had committed suicide. “This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya,” al-Ghwell said, adding that, throughout Gaddafi’s rule, there had been several instances in which political prisoners were reported to have committed suicide, but that “then the families get the bodies back and discover the prisoners had been shot in the back or tortured to death.”

As yet, we have had no reports about the condition of al-Libi’s body, but al-Ghwell indicated that he felt that al-Libi’s death may have followed the pattern established above, but with a twist based on the recent disclosure of documents relating to the Bush administration’s policies of “extraordinary rendition” and torture, and of Libya’s involvement. “My gut feeling is that something fishy happened here and somebody in Libya panicked,” he said, adding, as Newsweek described it, that, “With the prospect that the Obama administration might release more Bush-era documents about the treatment of CIA detainees, officials in the Gaddafi regime had reasons to be concerned that their ‘complicity’ in the US war on terror would be exposed.”

Adding another layer to this theory, Newsweek also reported that al-Libi “had recently been identified by defense lawyers in the US as a prime potential witness in any upcoming trials of top terror suspects, either in revamped military commissions or in US federal courts.” Brent Mickum, the attorney for Abu Zubaydah, another alleged “high-value detainee,” who knew al-Libi well, as they were both involved with the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, explained that he “had recently begun efforts through intermediaries to arrange to talk to Libi,” and said of his death, “The timing of this is weird.”

That’s all for now, but I hope to have a major update in the next few days.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For updates on this story, see: Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq and In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA), and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), linearization transfer characteristic mach-zehnder modulatorSecret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval (all April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

The Brad Blog, which picked up on the story of the strange death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi shortly after I published the first account in the Western media on Sunday evening, asked a question yesterday evening that I had been asking myself throughout the day:

So, it’s been about 16 hours since we covered indie journalist / historian / blogger Andy Worthington’s detailed report on the reported suicide of the man who falsely “confessed,” during torture, to a false tie between Iraq and al-Qaeda … As of this moment, not a single mainstream US newspaper or broadcast outlet has reported on the story. Is it not notable? Or are our newspapers just dead set on ensuring their irrelevance by continuing to not report on news that actually matters, no matter how widely it’s being reported in other parts of the world?

See the rest of the story here.

Reuters finally picked up on the story late yesterday afternoon, and secured a quote from Human Rights Watch researcher Heba Morayef, who said that she had seen al-Libi just two weeks ago, on April 27, during a visit to Abu Salim jail in Tripoli. She explained that he “appeared for just two minutes in a prison courtyard,” and that he “looked well, but was unwilling to speak” to the Human Rights Watch team, saying instead, “Where were you when I was being tortured in American prisons?”

This account corresponded with some news I received from a Libyan friend, who told me that “a reliable source” had told him that al-Libi’s body “was handed to his brother in the city of Ajdabiya.” The friend’s source corroborated Heba Morayef’s account of the prison visit, explaining that al-Libi “refused to meet them in anger because he thought, ‘Where were these organizations when I was badly tortured in US custody?’” In addition, the source, who had had access to al-Libi when he was in prison, said that he was held “in reasonable cell conditions.”

This doesn’t provide absolute confirmation of what happened to al-Libi, but it does seem to indicate fairly convincingly that he was in reasonable health just two weeks ago, which will only add to suspicions that, instead of committing suicide, as the Libyan authorities claimed, he was actually killed.

Late yesterday, Human Rights Watch issued a press release, calling on the Libyan authorities to conduct “a full and transparent investigation of the reported suicide,” in which they “should reveal what they know about al-Libi’s treatment in US and Egyptian custody.” Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said, “The death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi means that the world will never hear his account of the brutal torture he experienced. So now it is up to Libya and the United States to reveal the full story of what they know, including its impact on his mental health.”

Other Libyans subjected to “extraordinary rendition” by the CIA

Human Rights Watch also revealed that, although its researchers had been unable to talk to al-Libi, they did interview four other Libyan prisoners, sent to Libya by the CIA between 2004 to 2006, who stated that they had been tortured by US forces in detention centers in Afghanistan, and that US forces had also supervised their torture in Pakistan and Thailand.

One of the men, Mohamed Ahmad Mohamed al-Shoroeiya, also known as Hassan Rabi’i, told Human Rights Watch that “in mid-2003, in a place he believed was Bagram prison in Afghanistan,” he had been subjected to the following abuse: “The interpreters who directed the questions to us did it with beatings and insults. They used cold water, ice water. They put us in a tub with cold water. We were forced [to go] for months without clothes. They brought a doctor at the beginning. He put my leg in a plaster. One of the methods of interrogation was to take the plaster off and stand on my leg.”

The Washington Post published the story of al-Libi’s death in this morning’s edition, with a fine quote from Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch, who said, “I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration. He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war.” However, the Post failed to follow up on the stories of the other prisoners mentioned in the Human Rights Watch press release, even though, in October 2007, Craig Whitlock had written a front-page article for the Post, “From CIA Jails, Inmates Fade Into Obscurity,” which included details of the four prisoners.

Whitlock wrote that, when al-Libi was rendered to Libya by the CIA “in early 2006,” he “joined several other Libyans” — members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an exiled group dedicated to the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi —  “who had spent time in the CIA’s penal system.” Whitlock noted that, after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA “helped Libya’s spy agencies track down some of the leaders” of the LIFG, after they fled the country.

He reported that, according to Noman Benotman, an exiled former LIFG member, who had met the prisoners during a visit to Tripoli that was “arranged by the Libyan government as part of an effort to persuade the Libyan prisoners to reconcile with the Gaddafi regime,” the prisoners included Abdallah al-Sadeq, who “was apprehended in a covert CIA operation in Thailand in the spring of 2004,” and Abu Munder al-Saadi, described as “the group’s spiritual leader,” who was seized at an airport in Hong Kong. According to Benotman, these two men were only “held briefly” by the CIA before being rendered to Tripoli. “They realized very quickly that these guys had nothing to do with al-Qaeda,” Benotman explained. “They kept them for a few weeks, and that’s it.”

Benotman also explained that two other prisoners, Khaled al-Sharif “and another Libyan known only as Rabai” — the prisoner mentioned in the Human Rights Watch press release — “were captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2003 and spent time in a CIA prison in Afghanistan.”

I await the Human Rights Watch report on the Libyan visit with interest, as it will undoubtedly shed more light on the stories of these four men, who appear to be among the 94 prisoners who, in May 2005, in one of the notorious Office of Legal Counsel memos issued by the US Justice Department last month, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury acknowledged had been held in US custody.

Just as the story of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi should shine the most uncomfortable light on former Vice President Dick Cheney’s claims that the CIA’s web of secret prisons and proxy prisons protected America from further deadly attacks (and not, as it transpired, provided false information obtained through torture to justify an illegal war), so the stories of these four men deserve to be heard, to focus much-needed attention on a policy which, with no oversight from either Congress or the judiciary, allowed the Executive branch to indulge its dictatorial fantasies by “disappearing” prisoners anywhere around the world, and, in some cases, returning them to countries like Libya, with its notoriously poor human rights record, even when, as Craig Whitlock noted, at least two of these men “had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.”

And an even bigger story, to which I hope to return in future, involves asking searching questions of both the US and UK governments regarding their role in forcibly returning — or attempting to return — Libyan prisoners from Guantánamo, and Libyan residents in the UK, whose only crime, it appears, is to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time when Colonel Gaddafi, once regarded as a pariah and an international terrorist, became an ally in the “War on Terror,” and those who opposed him were transformed, overnight, from freedom fighters to terrorists.

Note: See here for some excellent political cartoons by Detainee DD, one of the Libyans held in the UK, see here for a report on the UK government’s failed attempts to forcibly repatriate Libyans in the UK, and see here, here, here and here for more stories of Libyans in Guantánamo.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For updates on the story, see: Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq and In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA), and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval (all April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For new readers, this article provides an overview of the story of the death of US “high-value detainee” Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, his “extraordinary rendition” by the CIA, and the torture that led to his false confession about a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. It draws on my article yesterday, announcing his death, and another article two weeks ago, Even in Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low, and it focuses, in particular, on Cheney’s role in using torture to manufacture a case for the invasion of Iraq, and in sidelining the FBI, who, in another world, might have secured useful intelligence from al-Libi and brought him to trial in the United States.

From Libya comes news of the death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a former “ghost prisoner” of the United States, whose false confession about a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein — extracted under torture in Egypt — was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The news will only add to the woes of the senior Bush administration officials who conceived the program of “extraordinary rendition” and torture within days of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and then, in a netherworld of secret memoranda, sought legal justification for their actions.

The fig leaf for the administration’s activities was the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the founding document of the “War on Terror,” passed by Congress in that first hectic, horrible week after the attacks, which authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

Behind the scenes, however, an extraordinary amount of quasi-legal maneuvering — and the silencing or sidelining of critics in numerous government departments, the intelligence services and branches of the military — was required in an attempt to cover up and justify a policy that actually involved a comprehensive flight from domestic and international law.

In the last six weeks, we have learned more than ever before about the extent of the Bush administration’s torture program, through revelations contained in a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, based on interviews with 14 “high-value detainees” held in secret CIA prisons (PDF), in the memos issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2005, which purported to justify the use of torture by the CIA, and in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report on the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo (PDF).

While the Obama administration — and, specifically, Attorney General Eric Holder — is still avoiding the most obvious response to this wealth of disturbing material, by appointing a Special Prosecutor to investigate the whole sordid saga, former Vice President Dick Cheney is still gobbling up airtime as though he were still in the White House. Yesterday, in an interview on CBS News’ “Face The Nation” (PDF), he insisted that information extracted through the use of what are euphemistically referred to as “harsh interrogation techniques” had saved “perhaps hundreds of thousands” of US lives.

Cheney has been on the attack since leaving office, but has stepped up his rhetoric since the OLC memos were released, recently calling for the release of other memos which, he claimed, would “show the success of the effort,” and adding, “There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity.”

Whether Cheney’s claims can be corroborated remains to be seen, but it is doubtful. In December, while he was defending his involvement in the approval for the use of waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning) on three “high-value detainees” — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri — Vanity Fair published an article in which other informed sources explained to the journalist David Rose why they doubted such claims.

Disputing Cheney’s claims that the interrogation of KSM had produced “a wealth of information,” former FBI agent Jack Cloonan said, “The proponents of torture say, ‘Look at the body of information that has been obtained by these methods.’ But if KSM and Abu Zubaydah did give up stuff, we would have heard the details.” Rose added that a former CIA officer asked, “Why can’t they say what the good stuff from Abu Zubaydah or KSM is? It’s not as if this is sensitive material from a secret, vulnerable source. You’re not blowing your source but validating your program. They say they can’t do this, even though five or six years have passed, because it’s a ‘continuing operation.’ But has it really taken so long to check it all out?”

The most damning opinion, however, was offered by FBI director Robert Mueller:

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

This was damaging enough, but three weeks ago, when the Senate report was published, it emerged that an Army psychiatrist had told the committee that “a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq,” but that “we were not successful in establishing a link,” and that, as a result, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

Following on from this revelation, astute observers recalled reports about the interrogations of two specific prisoners — Abu Zubayah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — which had gained notoriety not because they had secured information that had saved “perhaps hundreds of thousands” of US lives, but because they had resulted in false allegations about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, and that actually led to the loss of over 4,000 US lives, and the deaths of countless thousands of Iraqis.

David Rose revealed that Abu Zubaydah made a number of false confessions about connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, including a claim that Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq) were working with Saddam Hussein to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Rose added that a Pentagon analyst told him, “The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.”

The analyst also explained that, at the time, no one was told that the information had been obtained through torture, and that, when this was eventually revealed, “I was so angry, knowing that the higher-ups in the administration knew he was tortured, and that the information he was giving up was tainted by the torture, and that it became one reason to attack Iraq.” He added, “It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective.”

With Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the use of torture to extract a false confession about a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had an even more devastating effect. Seized by the Pakistani authorities in December 2001, as he crossed the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and then handed over to US forces, al-Libi was rendered by the CIA to Egypt, where, under torture, he claimed that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.

This claim was used by Colin Powell, in his speech to the UN in February 2003, when the Secretary of State was attempting to drum up support for the invasion of Iraq, even though, as the New York Times revealed in 2005, the Defense Department’s own Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded, in February 2002, that al-Libi was “intentionally misleading” his interrogators.

Al-Libi withdrew his confession in February 2004, when he was returned to CIA custody, and as Newsweek reported in 2007, the circumstances of his “confession” could hardly have been less conducive to the discovery of the truth. As the magazine explained, he told his debriefers that “he initially told his interrogators that he ‘knew nothing’ about ties between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden and he ‘had difficulty even coming up with a story’ about a relationship between the two.” However, “his answers displeased his interrogators,” who then subjected him to a mock burial, imprisoning him for 17 hours in “a box less than 20 inches high.” When the box was opened, al-Libi “said he was given one final opportunity to ‘tell the truth.’ He was knocked to the floor and ‘punched for 15 minutes.’ It was only then that, al-Libi said, he made up the story about Iraqi weapons training.”

Few in the West will mourn al-Libi’s death in a Libyan prison, although legitimate questions may well be raised about whether he died, as the Libyan authorities stated, by committing suicide, or whether he was, in fact, murdered by Colonel Gaddafi’s regime. As the emir of the Khaldan training camp, he, like his colleague Abu Zubaydah, was not a member of al-Qaeda, although it appears that he was committed to violent jihad against dictatorships in Muslim countries supported by the West — and, to some extent, to attacks on Western countries as well. However, after seven years of torture in Jordan, Egypt and Libya, and in CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Poland, which seems, in the end, to have produced no intelligence of any value whatsoever, I can only wonder what genuinely useful information he might have provided had the FBI, which was initially involved in his questioning, been allowed to continue interrogating him without the use of torture.

In February 2005, veteran FBI agent Jack Cloonan told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that, after al-Libi’s capture, the FBI had begun to build up “a good rapport” with him, after Cloonan told the agents in Afghanistan, “Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau’s reputation, if you don’t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.”

I also wonder how Dick Cheney is proposing to spin his way out of his involvement in a story that clearly seems to have demonstrated the very opposite of everything that he has claimed, and whether he will be called upon to answer an allegation made by Noman Benotman, an exiled opponent of the Gaddafi regime, who told Newsweek in 2007 that a senior Libyan official had told him that “the Libyan government has agreed not to publicly confirm anything about al-Libi — out of deference to the Bush administration.” Benotman explained, “If the Libyans will confirm it, it will embarrass the Americans because he is linked to the Iraq issue.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

For updates on the story, see: The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence? and Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq and In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA), and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval (all April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

The Arabic media is ablaze with the news that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of an Afghan training camp — whose claim that Saddam Hussein had been involved in training al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons was used to justify the invasion of Iraq — has died in a Libyan jail. So far, however, the only English language report is on the Algerian website Ennahar Online, which reported that the Libyan newspaper Oea stated that al-Libi (aka Ali Abdul Hamid al-Fakheri) “was found dead of suicide in his cell,” and noted that the newspaper had reported the story “without specifying the date or method of suicide.”

This news resolves, in the grimmest way possible, questions that have long been asked about the whereabouts of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, perhaps the most famous of “America’s Disappeared” — prisoners seized in the “War on Terror,” who were rendered not to Guantánamo but to secret prisons run by the CIA or to the custody of governments in third countries — often their own — where, it was presumed, they would never be seen or heard from again.

The emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, al-Libi was one of hundreds of prisoners seized by Pakistani forces in December 2001, crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Most of these men ended up in Guantánamo after being handed over (or sold) to US forces by their Pakistani allies, but al-Libi was, notoriously, rendered to Egypt by the CIA to be tortured on behalf of the US government.

In Egypt, he came up with the false allegation about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used by President Bush in a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, just days before Congress voted on a resolution authorizing the President to go to war against Iraq, in which, referring to the supposed threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, Bush said, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”

Four months later, on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell made the same claim in his notorious speech to the UN Security Council, in an attempt to drum up support for the invasion. “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda,” Powell said, adding, “Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.” As a Newsweek report in 2007 explained, Powell did not identify al-Libi by name, but CIA officials — and a Senate Intelligence Committee report — later confirmed that he was referring to al-Libi.

Al-Libi recanted his story in February 2004, when he was returned to the CIA’s custody, and explained, as Newsweek described it, that he told his debriefers that “he initially told his interrogators that he ‘knew nothing’ about ties between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden and he ‘had difficulty even coming up with a story’ about a relationship between the two.” The Newsweek report explained that “his answers displeased his interrogators — who then apparently subjected him to the mock burial. As al-Libi recounted, he was stuffed into a box less than 20 inches high. When the box was opened 17 hours later, al-Libi said he was given one final opportunity to ‘tell the truth.’ He was knocked to the floor and ‘punched for 15 minutes.’ It was only then that, al-Libi said, he made up the story about Iraqi weapons training.”

As I explained in a recent article, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low, drawing on reports in the New York Times and by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, the use of al-Libi to extract a false confession that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq was particularly shocking, because a Defense Intelligence Agency report had concluded in February 2002 that al-Libi was lying, and Dan Coleman of the FBI (which had been pulled off al-Libi’s case when the CIA — and the administration — decided to render him to torture in Egypt) had no doubt that the emir of an Afghan training camp would know nothing about Iraq. “It was ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would have known anything about Iraq,” Coleman told Jane Mayer. “I could have told them that. He ran a training camp. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with Iraq.”

There have long been suspicions that, after the CIA had finished exploiting al-Libi, he was sent back to Libya, but although Ennahar Online claimed that he “was sentenced to life imprisonment” in Libya, and that a representative of Human Rights Watch had recently met him in prison (which I have not yet had time to investigate, but find highly unlikely), the most detailed story about what happened to him, and why he was not sent to Guantánamo with 14 other “high-value detainees” in September 2006, was provided to Newsweek by Noman Benotman, an exiled Libyan opposed to the regime of Colonel Gaddafi, who said, in May 2007, that

during a recent trip to Tripoli, he met with a senior Libyan government official who confirmed to him that al-Libi had been quietly returned to Libya and is now in prison there. Benotman said that he was told by the senior Libyan government official — whom he declined to publicly identify — that al-Libi is extremely ill, suffering from tuberculosis and diabetes. “He is there in jail and very sick,” Benotman [said]. He also said that the senior official told him that the Libyan government has agreed not to publicly confirm anything about al-Libi — out of deference to the Bush administration. “If the Libyans will confirm it, it will embarrass the Americans because he is linked to the Iraq issue,” Benotman said.

The most important question that needs asking just now, of course, is whether it was possible for al-Libi to commit suicide in a Libyan jail, or whether he was murdered. I doubt that we will ever find out the truth, but whatever the case, the focus on his death should not rest solely on Libya, which only took possession of him after the US administration had made use of him to justify the invasion of Iraq. Whatever al-Libi’s actual crimes, his use as a tool in a program of “extraordinary rendition” and torture, exploited shamelessly not to foil future terrorist plots but to yield false information about al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, remains a low point in a “War on Terror” that has few redeeming features.

POSTSCRIPT (June 5): In response to a query about the visit to al-Libi by representatives of Human Rights Watch, from blogger Eric Pottenger, who wrote a post about al-Libi here, I’ve realized that I need to clarify the doubts I expressed above about this visit, as mentioned in Ennahar Online. At the time (the evening of Sunday May 10), I wrote that I had “not yet had time to investigate” the claim, but that I found it “highly unlikely.” What I need to clarify is that I was suspicious at the time, because Algerian English language sources online are notoriously unreliable, but I spoke to Human Rights Watch on the Monday, and believe that their representatives did indeed see al-Libi in the prison, and that he refused to be interviewed by them, asking them only where they had been while he was being tortured, as I reported in a follow-up article on the Tuesday.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For updates on the story, see: Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA), and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.