Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Since the publication last week of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report into detainee abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo (PDF), much has been made of a footnote containing a comment made by Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist with the Army’s 85th Medical Detachment’s Combat Stress Control Team, who, with two colleagues, was “hijacked” into [...]

In Part One of this article, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, examined Dick Cheney’s recent interview with ABC News, in which the Vice President presented a detailed defense of the administration’s national security policies, throwing down a very public gauntlet to critics of [...]

The media is buzzing with the news that Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, admitted in an open session of Congress yesterday that waterboarding –- a long-reviled torture technique, which produces the perception of drowning –- was used on three “high-value” al-Qaeda suspects in CIA custody in 2002 and 2003. The three men –- [...]