Mr. Belhadj, also identified as Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq, has instructed solicitors at Leigh Day & Co. to take legal action, and the legal action charity Reprieve are acting as US counsel and are also providing investigative support.

In 2004, when Mr. Belhadj’s ordeal at the hands of the British, the Americans and the Gaddafi regime began, he was living in Beijing, China, having previously led the resistance to the Gaddafi regime, and having, for a while, lived in Afghanistan. In early 2004, when Ms. Bouchar began to fear they were under surveillance, they decided to try to seek asylum in the UK. At the airport, however, they were detained and deported to Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, their previous destination before China.

On arrival they were seized and held for several weeks, and then told that they would be allowed to travel to the UK, via Bangkok. They were then “forced to board an aircraft” bound for Bangkok, as Reprieve explained in a press release, and then “separated, handed over to US authorities and taken to what they believe was a US secret prison,” where “they were subjected to a barrage of barbaric treatment.” If this was in Thailand, then it may contradict claims that the secret prison used to hold “high-value detainees” in 2002 closed at the end of that year, as a new facility opened in Poland.

Mr. Belhadj has explained that, when he was not being interrogated, he “was hung by his wrists from hooks in his cell for prolonged periods, while hooded, blindfolded and viciously beaten.” Fatima Bouchar has said that she was “mistreated so severely that she finds it difficult to discuss even today.”

Still isolated from each other, they were then rendered to Libya from Bangkok by the US authorities, and, as was normal for US rendition fights, Mr. Belhadj “was hooded and shackled to the floor of the plane in a stress position, unable to sit or lie during the entire 17-hour flight.” Adding to British woes, the flight stopped to re-fuel in Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean Territory leased to the US, where, for many years, there have been rumors of the existence of another secret prison.

In Libya, Mr. Belhadj was imprisoned for six years in some of the country’s most brutal jails, including Abu Salim in Tripoli, where 1200 prisoners were killed in a massacre by Gaddafi’s forces in 1996. In Libya’s prisons, he “was savagely beaten, hung from walls and cut off from human contact and daylight,” and has stated that he was interrogated by “foreign” agents, including agents from the UK. In 2008, he was sentenced to death after a 15-minute trial. For two more years, his abuse continued, and then, in 2010, he was released as part of negotiations between the Gaddafi regime and former members of the LIFG.

Alarmingly, Fatima Bouchar was also imprisoned on her return to Libya, and was subjected to aggressive interrogations,. In total, she was held for four months, and was released just three weeks before her baby was born. As Reprieve noted, by this time “her health, and that of her baby, was in a precarious state.”

Speaking of the case, Cori Crider, Reprieve’s legal director, said, “Mr. Belhaj was totally willing to come to an agreement with the British government. He made it absolutely plain that what he cared about was an open apology and for those who tortured him and his wife to be brought to justice. It is only after those requests were ignored for a month that he has decided to make his grievance public.”

Sapna Malik of Leigh Day & Co. added, “[T]he barbaric treatment which our clients describe, both at the hands of the Americans and the Libyans is beyond comprehension and yet it appears that the UK was responsible for setting off this torturous chain of events … [O]ur clients want those responsible for the wrongs done to them, and other Libyans, in the past be held to account and the truth to come out, so that the new Libya can finally turn the page.”

Disgracefully, evidence of the UK’s role in the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhadj and Fatima Bouchar was revealed in a number of fawning, and previously classified documents that came to light in Tripoli, in September, as the Gaddafi regime fell, and which were discovered by Human Rights Watch. These documents reveal that the British government told the Libyan government that the couple were in Malaysia in early March 2004, and Sir Mark Allen, who was then the director of counter-terrorism at MI6, wrote to the notorious torturer Moussa Koussa, the head of  Libyan intelligence, who, earlier this year, fled Libya as the regime began tumbling and was briefly welcomed in the UK.

In a letter dated March 18, 2004, just a week before British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Gaddafi in Libya to welcome him on board as an ally in the “war on terror,” Allen wrote an embarrassing and self-incriminating letter, in which he stated, “Most importantly, I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Abu Abd Allah Sadiq [Abdel Hakim Belhadj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over the years. I am so glad. I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week.”

He added, “Amusingly, we got a request from the Americans to channel requests for information from Abu Abd Allah through the Americans. I have no intention of doing any such thing. The intelligence on Abu Abd Allah was British. I know I did not pay for the air cargo. But I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this and am very grateful for the help you are giving us.”

Abdel Hakim Belhaj is not the first former opponent of Gaddafi to sue the British government. In October, Sami al-Saadi (also known as Abu Munthir), another prominent figure in the LIFG, launched an action to claim damages from the British government after the documents discovered in Tripoli revealed the key role played by MI6 in his rendition as well. The Tripoli documents revealed a fax the CIA sent to Moussa Koussa, just two days before Tony Blair’s visit to Gaddafi, which, as the Guardian put it, “shows that the agency was eager to join in the Saadi rendition operation after learning that MI6 and Gaddafi’s government were about to embark upon it.”

As the Guardian was also keen to point out, after Blair’s visit, Gaddafi announced that he “had signed a £550m gas exploration deal with Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant.” Three days later, part of thew human cargo that helped to buy this deal — Sami al-Saadi — who had been seized by British agents in Hong Kong with his wife, two sons aged 12 and nine, and two daughters aged 14 and six, was forced onto a plane with his family and flown to Tripoli, where, on arrival, “he and his wife were handcuffed and hooded, and their legs were bound together with lengths of wire,” and “[t]he entire family was then thrown in jail.” Al-Saadi’s wife and children were released after two months of what he described as “psychological torture,” while he, like Belhaj, was held for six years and, as he explained, “repeatedly beaten, subjected to electric shocks and threatened with death.”

In a claim that also explains how British cynicism spread beyond Libya, he also said that “he was interrogated about Libyans living in the UK, shown photographs of a number of them, and on one occasion questioned by two British intelligence officers while one of his Libyan interrogators was present,” and what is clear from the experience of Libyan dissidents in the UK, who had claimed asylum, is that, after Gaddafi’s miraculous volte-face, his enemies were subjected to arbitrary imprisonment in the UK (in prisons, and also under house arrest) and shameful attempts to repatriate them, in contravention of the UN Convention Against Torture and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Reinforcing this assessment, the Guardian explained that al-Saadi “had lived in north London for several years in the 90s, having claimed asylum in the UK, and a number of his associates suspect he was handed over to Gaddafi as a ‘gift,’ rather than as an individual who threatened British national security,” much as those other individuals became playthings in a depressingly immoral game.

The Guardian also noted that the CIA fax made it clear that “the plan was to render not just Saadi but also his family,” even though what awaited them in Gaddafi’s Libya was obvious. Foreign Office representatives refused to comment, but solicitors at Leigh Day & Co. and lawyers at Reprieve pointed out that they had identified other documents in the Tripoli cache relating to al-Saadi, including one showing MI6 “preparing the ground for his rendition five months before it happened,” in a fax sent in November 2003, in which an MI6 officer “tells one of Koussa’s aides that the agency is talking to the Chinese intelligence services about ‘the Islamic extremist target in China.’”

Back in October, Cori Crider said of al-Saadi’s claim, “The British security services have let slip that Sami al-Saadi’s illegal kidnap was ‘ministerially authorised.’ So who signed the torture warrant? Was it [former foreign secretary] Jack Straw? The Metropolitan Police must launch an immediate criminal investigation, focusing on the highest echelons of British government. The British public, to say nothing of Sami, his wife and his family, have a right to know.”

With Abdel Hakim Belhaj joining Sami al-Saadi in suing the British government, these are difficult times for Prime Minister David Cameron, who now finds Libyans joining a queue of torture victims seeking a thorough inquiry into Britain’s use of torture, and not the whitewash envisaged by Cameron, who, in July 2009, initiated a largely secretive judge-led inquiry, which has yet to begin its deliberations, but which has been boycotted by all the major NGOs.

Sadly, the Obama administration, as is typical, is studiously avoiding having to answer any questions about the Bush administration’s involvement in the rendition and torture not only of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, but also of several other Libyans, some of whom I profiled for the United Nations, and also wrote about in an article in September 2010, entitled, “Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Freed in Libya After Three Years’ Detention – And Information About ‘Ghost Prisoners.’”

Most significant, however, is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the former emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan. Seized by the US crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, he was sent to Egypt to be tortured, where he came up with a false confession that al-Qaeda operatives had met with Saddam Hussein to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons. Al-Libi recanted his claim, but it was, nevertheless, used to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq, and al-Libi himself, after a tour of US torture prisons, was also returned to Libya, where he too was imprisoned and tortured, Unlike Balhaj, al-Saadi and others, however, al-Libi never survived. In May 2009, it was reported that he had committed suicide in his cell at Abu Salim prison, a story that no one with knowledge of Gaddafi — or, for that matter, the CIA — believed, especially as ming, the US embassy in Tripoli reopened just three days after his death.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

For now, however, I am delighted that his main compound in Tripoli and his gaudy palaces have been ransacked, and, in particular, that his main prison, Abu Salim, has been liberated. My interest in Libya stems not only from a general revulsion at the barbarity of dictatorships, but also through my friendship with Omar Deghayes, the former Guantánamo prisoner who came to the UK as a child in the 1980s after his father, a lawyer and trade union activist, was murdered by Gaddafi.

Through Omar, I met other Libyans, like the brave filmmaker Mohamed Maklouf, and also learned about the single most outrageous act of Gaddafi’s dictatorship — the massacre of 1,200 prisoners at Abu Salim on June 29, 1996. I wrote a detailed article about the massacre on its 13th anniversary, in 2009, and as the uprising against Gaddafi began in Benghazi, in February, I found it appropriate that the spark for Libya’s revolution was the arrest in Benghazi on February 15 of Fathi Terbil, a lawyer who represents the families of those killed in the Abu Salim massacre, and who lost three family members, including his brother, in the massacre, as I explained in my article, “How the Abu Salim Prison Massacre in 1996 Inspired the Revolution in Libya.”

As I stated at the time, drawing on an NPR report, for years Fathi Terbil “held an often solitary weekly protest in front of the courthouse, demanding justice,” and “was arrested seven times” and “repeatedly tortured.” On February 15, however, his arrest (even though he was subsequently released) prompted thousands of people to protest, igniting an unstoppable movement within just 24 hours. He told Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News:

We, the Abu Salim families, ignited the revolution. The Libyan people were ready to rise up because of the injustice they experienced in their lives, but they needed a cause. So calling for the release of people, including me, who had been arrested became the justification for their protest.

Below are a number of videos covering the liberation of Abu Salim. The first is an 11-minute unedited video, in Arabic, and below that is a short report from CNN. The videos are followed by cross-posts of two articles containing the reflections of former prisoners, as published in the Washington Post and on CNN.

Libyans find freedom at Moammar Gaddafi’s Abu Salim prison in Tripoli
Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post, August 26, 2011

In the 14 years that Islamic activist Saad al-Eshouli spent in a small cell in one of the most notorious prisons of Moammar Gaddafi’s Libya, the outside world had become a distant memory.

So when rebels opened the gates of the Abu Salim prison Wednesday and he joined the other 2,500 detainees pouring out, he was amazed by novelties such as mobile phones and satellite dishes.

The prison had been the black hole of Gaddafi’s reign — many went in, but few came out. The Libyan autocrat used the facility to make his political opponents disappear. In 1996, when prisoners revolted over living conditions, some 1,200 inmates were massacred.

It was the arrest in February of a lawyer representing the families of those killed that sparked the uprising that toppled Gaddafi this week.

Within the prison, Eshouli’s life revolved around conversations with his eight cellmates, who shared a shower, small kitchen and toilet in a 100-square-foot room. He was not allowed to receive visitors, and he had no contact with his twin brother, Mehdi, who was arrested with him in 1997 but was released five years later.

As time passed, the guards and interrogators forgot why Eshouli, 40, was imprisoned. He started thinking that Abu Salim, one of the many concrete detention facilities that dotted Libya, was his final destination.

“This room is where I expected to die,” he said Friday, standing in front of cellblock 13, which was lined with mattresses and plastic bags containing inmates’ belongings.

Largely unaware of the storm that had broken Gaddafi’s four-decade-long grip on the country, Eshouli thought the rattling of gunfire and thuds of explosions this past week were God’s trumpets heralding the moment of his death.

“We expected another massacre,” he said while guiding rebels and journalists through the now-deserted prison. Instead, the guards suddenly ran off.

There are moments of happiness that are unexplainable, Eshouli said, and this was one of them. “There is no way to describe how great it felt to be free,” he said.

A day later, he was reunited with his twin brother, who had come from Benghazi to search for him.

The two men stood next to each other Friday. One was pale. The other’s skin was dark from years of exposure to the sun.

“I thought he was dead,” Mehdi said.

The brothers had arrived at the prison a year after the massacre. Ali Maktouq, another former inmate, pointed Friday to the site where he said the victims had been buried in a mass grave.

“First they killed those who they wanted to kill,” said Maktouq, 41. “Then they lined us up against a wall, cocking their weapons.”

Maktouq was spared, however, and he was freed sometime later.

He said the guards made the survivors clean the blood from their cells. After earning his freedom, he remained in the neighborhood and visited the prison every day to show solidarity with his former cellmates.

Now that the rebels control the vast majority of Tripoli, Maktouq said, he wants them to convert the prison into a park, or a university, or anything that builds society instead of crushing it.

Already on Friday, he was learning to stand in the prison without feeling fear. For the first time, he said, the prison’s walls symbolized freedom.

“I can’t believe I am here, in this place, speaking my mind,” Maktouq said. “I am no longer afraid.”

Witness to Libyan prison massacre seeks justice for victims
Moni Basu, CNN, August 27, 2011

Hussein Shafei prepared Saturday for a journey back to a place of darkness in Libya.

Soon, he plans to stand again in Cell 14, Block 2 at the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. Only this time, the metal door will not slam behind him, caging him in a bathroom-size cell.

He will be a free man within the confines of what became a potent symbol of Moammar Gadhafi’s repression — Libya’s Abu Ghraib.

Shafei wants to return to the place where he witnessed a massacre that fuels his nightmares. Sometimes, he said, his wife would wake him up in the middle of the night, saying, “Hussein. You are screaming. You are scaring the kids.”

As many as 1,200 prisoners were killed at Abu Salim in the summer of 1996, according to Human Rights Watch. Without justice, the infamous event festered in Libya’s national psyche and eventually acted as tinder to spark the flame of revolt in February of this year.

Rebels stormed the prison a few days ago, freeing those held inside, including an American journalist.

“I am so excited about Tripoli,” Shafei said of the distinct possibility of the capital falling under rebel control. “This is the moment I have been waiting for for so many years.”

Since his release in 2000, Shafei had thought about Abu Salim’s dead. Where were their bodies? What was it like for their children to grow up without their fathers? For a wife to not know what happened to her husband?

He vowed to expose the carnage of that June day.

Then this week in Benghazi, he watched a video posted on YouTube that purportedly showed the storming of Abu Salim. Shafei, now working with the opposition in Benghazi, knew he had to return there.

He was waiting to board a plane to Tripoli. Or perhaps, with the fighting still raging in places like Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte, he will have to go by boat.

With the Libyan regime on the brink of collapse, Shafei hopes the truth about Abu Salim will finally be known. He is hardly alone in his wish.

The shooting went on for almost three hours

Shafei was a teenage college student when he was arrested for offending the regime. Inspired by perestroika reforms in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, he spoke out in favor of greater freedoms in his own country.

Shafei’s mother, Najia, clearly remembers that day in 1988 when she returned to her home in Benghazi to find her daughters wailing. Her son was gone.

“We had no idea where he was,” she said from her home in Atlanta. “Whether he was alive or dead.”

Nineteen months passed before Najia Shafei learned, through contacts, her son’s whereabouts. After that, she occasionally made the long trek west from Benghazi to the prison in Tripoli.

The guards would drag her son out of his cell and into a warehouse at the entrance of the jail, where mother and son met.

If she was lucky, she got 20 minutes with him, she said.

She could never ask him about his situation. There were always guards listening in. He could never tell her about what he knew was going on in that jail — beatings, torture, deaths.

Shafei spent eight years that way, in a cramped cell, without his family or the education he should have finished. His father died in 1994 and he was released for three days to attend the funeral. That was the extent of his freedom.

Then, on June 28, 1996, prisoners rioting over poor conditions and restricted family visits seized a guard and escaped from their cells.

“Five or seven minutes after it started, the guards on the roofs shot at the prisoners who were in the open areas,” Shafei said in an interview with Human Rights Watch many years later.

Security officials ordered the shooting to stop and feigned negotiations. But Shafei told Human Rights Watch that the officials instead called in firing squads to gun down about 1,200 people.

He said a grenade was thrown into the courtyards where the prisoners were gathered.

“I heard an explosion, and right after, a constant shooting started from heavy weapons and Kalashnikovs from the top of the roofs,” he said. “The shooting continued from 11 until 1:35.”

Much later, while buying lamb at a slaughterhouse in the United States, Shafei commented to his brother Nabil: Not even here can they kill at the rate Gadhafi’s men did that day.

“I could not see the dead prisoners who were shot, but I could see those who were shooting,” Shafei told Human Rights Watch. “They were a special unit and wearing khaki military hats. Six were using Kalashnikovs. I saw them — at least six men — on the roofs of the cellblocks.”

The next day, Shafei was ordered to clean the blood-smeared watches taken off the wrists of the dead.

Human Rights Watch said it had no way to verify Shafei’s story but another description of the incident from a report by the opposition National Front for the Salvation of Libya corroborated Shafei’s account.

Gadhafi’s government did not acknowledge the killings and denied any crime had taken place. More than a decade after the Abu Salim incident, the United Nations Human Rights Council noted that the Libyan government was unable to provide any information on its investigation of the allegations.

But the families, mostly from Benghazi, now the de facto rebel capital, did not abandon their longing for answers.

Some of them filed a complaint in a Libyan court in 2007. The Gadhafi regime offered them compensation in exchange for their silence, according to Human Rights Watch.

But the families refused the money, considering it a bribe. Instead, they boldly began to protest each Saturday in Benghazi, an action unprecedented in Gadhafi’s four decades of rule.

“It was radical,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and Africa division at Human Rights Watch.

The government began informing some of the families that their loved ones were dead. But no bodies was ever returned nor a cause of death given.

Among those waiting to find out more are three brothers in Atlanta whose father, opposition activist Izzat Almegaryaf, was plucked from his home 20 years ago.

The Almegaryaf brothers know their father was detained at Abu Salim — they received letters from him in the early 1990s. But the letters stopped a few years into Izzat Almegaryaf’s imprisonment. His sons do not know whether their father was among the massacre victims.

Tasbeeh Herwees, a Libyan-American journalism student in California, recalled in a blog post the funerals for the Abu Salim victims held in the summer of 2009 when she visited Benghazi.

“Inna lillahi wa ilayhi rajioon,” each family said. Verily, we belong to God, and to God we return.

Herwees tripped over the words in Arabic, but by the end of her stay she had repeated the phrase so many times that she was fluent.

“I spent more time in tents that summer than in my own home, the cloth of my black abaya sticking irritatingly to my skin from the Saharan humidity,” she wrote. “In the faces of the family of the dead, I detected relief in the sea of sadness. ‘At least now we know,’ they said.”

Then in February of this year, the regime arrested Fathi Terbil, a human rights lawyer who represented some of the Abu Salim families. Hundreds of people jammed the streets of Benghazi to protest.

Terbil was released but the demonstrations did not stop. A revolution took root.

“The memories of that summer come rushing back as I watch the present events in Libya unfold from my home in Cypress, California,” Herwees wrote. “It was, after all, the Abu Salim families who kick-started this revolution. It was they who initiated protests in Benghazi in front of police headquarters when their lawyer, Fathi Terbil, was mysteriously detained by security officials.”

Exposing the carnage

After 12 years at Abu Salim, Shafei was released in 2000. He often cried openly, with flashbacks triggered by something as small as macaroni reminiscent of Abu Salim chow, said his older brother, Nabil Shafei.

He eventually made his way to the United States, where Nabil lived.

“Hussein came here and had a mission,” Nabil Shafei said. “He wanted to expose the massacre of Abu Salim.”

Hussein Shafei told Human Rights Watch about the carnage he witnessed. He even approached the State Department, which includes the Abu Salim massacre in its statements on human rights abuses in Libya.

As the civil war raged this year and Benghazi blossomed as a city free of Gadhafi’s grip, Shafei, now 42, returned there from Charlotte, North Carolina. He took his wife and three children with him.

He has been working with the opposition television station and telling the world about the dark secrets of Abu Salim. Now, as the newly freed prisoners began returning home to Benghazi, Shafei knew the time had come for him to go back to the prison.

It is part of his own healing. The nation must heal, too, he believes. The first step will be to hold Libyan leaders accountable for what happened at the prison.

Najia Shafei is wary of her son’s trip to Tripoli. She remains fearful about what might happen to him as long as Gadhafi is still alive.

But Hussein Shafei is determined to complete his mission. He owes it to all those who survived Abu Salim. But mostly, he owes it to the souls of the dead.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

“For nearly a decade,” the article explained, “the US has conducted a major cloak-and-missile campaign against al-Qaeda, teaming up with friendly Arab leaders to swap intelligence, interrogate suspects, train commandos or carry out military strikes from Morocco to Iraq … Now popular movements sweeping the region have knocked some counterterrorism allies from power, and left others too distracted or politically vulnerable to risk open cooperation with the US. Intelligence-sharing has already slowed in some areas as the US struggles to identify reliable counterparts in reshuffled governments.”

One official said, “It’s difficult to share information when you don’t know who the players are.”

The article also claimed, “The upheaval has upended US foreign policy in the region, with old friends shaken or gone and the allegiance of emerging leaders uncertain. The effects on counterterrorism efforts are one of the aftershocks that worry the intelligence community the most.”

Barnes and Embus also quoted government officials as telling them that they had “lost track of many former Guantánamo detainees who had been sent home to the Middle East and North Africa,” and that losing track of these former prisoners was “a sign that unrest in the region is disrupting critical terror-fighting relationships America has built up since the Sept. 11 attacks.”

Why US intelligence officials’ statements to the Wall Street Journal are disturbing

There were problems with these claims that neither journalist picked up; namely, that the claim about “losing track” of former prisoners is, to put it bluntly, a lie, and also that the revolutionary “unrest” that has toppled the regimes of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt can legitimately be viewed not as “disrupting” what US intelligence agencies regard as “critical terror-fighting relationships” but as hugely popular revolutionary movements that have removed from power two hated dictators whose oppression of their people was only possible because they were backed by the US and by other Western countries.

For these home-grown revolutionary movements, the description of their hated dictators as “friendly Arab leaders,” with whom the United States was cosily involved in “swap[ping] intelligence” and “interrogat[ing] suspects,” will, if widely disseminated in the region, only reinforce the notion that America cannot be trusted. This is because one of the drivers of the revolutionary movement in Egypt was a thorough disgust at how the government’s “emergency powers,” enforced continually throughout Mubarak’s 30 years in power, underpinned an essentially unaccountable regime of torture prisons run by the state security services, and secretive courts handing down punitive sentences and laundering information derived through the use of torture, without anything resembling due process. Similar complaints also drove the Tunisian uprising, which lit the spark of revolution throughout the Middle East in the first place.

The tension between America’s perceived security needs and the desires of the people of the Middle East was clearly recognized in the Wall Street Journal article, which noted, “Publicly, the Obama administration has embraced the democratic tide, arguing that political freedoms will diminish the standing of al-Qaeda in the Middle East and beyond,” and quoting defense secretary Robert Gates stating that “the pro-democracy protests ‘give the lie’ to al-Qaeda’s message that change is possible only through violence,” and that they “are an extraordinary setback for al-Qaeda.”

This ought to be the key message that America takes from the upheavals sweeping the Middle East, although the Wall Street Journal also noted, “Privately, counterterrorism officials in the US and Europe are watching the sweeping changes with a mixture of alarm and dread,” worried about Yemen, long regarded as a dangerously unstable nation, and also “worried that the level of cooperation from security services in Tunisia and Egypt, longtime partners, will decline as new leaders distance themselves from past abuses.”

It should also be noted that, when Robert Gates referred to the pro-democracy movements giving the lie to al-Qaeda’s message that “change is only possible through violence,” he ought to have reflected that the same message should apply equally to the US. Such an epiphany seems unlikely, but although this places America in an unusual position with regard to the bigger picture of the upheavals in the region — largely confined to watching as people’s movements take the initiative themselves — on other details, such as claims about the value of America’s relationship with regimes notorious for their use of torture, and the significance of prisoners released from Guantánamo, it is more than possible to refute claims that seek to suggest that the crimes, mistakes and distortions of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” are in any way justified.

Why there is no threat from former Guantánamo prisoners in Egypt or Tunisia

In the first instance, to thoroughly undermine the claim that the US government is “losing track” of former prisoners — and to demonstrate that this encounter between the Wall Street Journal and US intelligence was therefore something of a propaganda construct — it is only necessary to consider that, in the only countries where “unrest” has toppled dictators — Tunisia and Egypt — only four former Guantánamo prisoners have been released, and none of them are even remotely involved in anything to do with terrorism.

In Egypt, one of the two men is Sami El-Laithi (aka El-Leithi, and spelled Allaithy by the US authorities). Now 55 years old, he had been teaching at the University of Kabul when the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began in October 2001, and, like many hundreds of others, he was seized and sent to Guantánamo after escaping to Pakistan. Unlike any other Guantánamo prisoner, however, El-Laithi was so brutally set upon by guards in Guantánamo one evening that they broke his spine, and he has been confined to a wheelchair ever since. Returned to Egypt on October 1, 2005, he was then held by Egypt’s state security agency at a special prison section in Cairo’s El-Qasr Al-Eini Hospital, and has stated his belief that, had he not been physically handicapped, he would not have been released. Now largely confined to his home village, outside Cairo, he is neither a threat nor an unknown quantity.

Had El-Laithi not been crippled, his thoughts about how he would not have been released from Egyptian custody reflect what happened to Reda Fadel El-Weleli (identified in Guantánamo as Fael Roda Al-Waleeli), the first Egyptian transferred from Guantánamo to Egypt, who arrived in Cairo on July 1, 2003, and subsequently disappeared. In October 2009, Martin Scheinin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, complained that, after a visit to Egypt in April 2009, he “regrets that the Government of Egypt did not reply to his questions on the fate of … El-Weleli,” although I was later told that UN representatives finally succeeded in tracking him down, and that he was a broken figure, and very obviously a threat to nobody, who explained that, after his return from Guantánamo, he had been held and tortured in a secret prison in Egypt for three and a half years.

In Tunisia, the US government also knows the whereabouts of the two men it transferred to Tunisian custody in June 2007, who, it should be noted, had been cleared for release by a military review board convened under President Bush. Until very recently, both were in prison, having been imprisoned after show trials on their return, despite the signing of a “diplomatic assurance” between the US government and President Ben Ali, which purported to guarantee that they would be treated fairly when repatriated.

One of the two, Lotfi Lagha, was freed after his three-year sentence came to an end last year, and the other, Abdallah Hajji, was freed in February this year after the flight of Ben Ali. The eight-year sentence he had been given in 2007 was overturned, amidst the recognition that he had never been involved in any kind of terrorism, and was, instead, a member of Ennahdha, the Islamic opposition group, banned by Ben Ali, whose members were conveniently labeled as terrorists during the “War on Terror.” Both men can easily be found in Tunisia, as a former exiled political opponent of the regime, Fathi Messaoudi, explained to me when I met him a few days ago.

Having recently returned to Tunisia for the first time in 20 years, Messaoudi, a charismatic blind man who was regarded as such a threat by Ben Ali that he had been given a 75-year prison sentence by the former regime, told me that he met Abdallah Hajji and that, although he relished his freedom, he too was a broken man, and had been haunted, since his imprisonment on his return to Tunisia, by threats that his wife and daughters would be brought before him by the secret police and raped.

Why America’s intelligence services still love arbitrary detention and torture

In addition, another intention regarding the US claims about former prisoners in Tunisia and Egypt appears to be to cast doubts on the security of both countries following their popular revolutions and the flight of their dictators. This, too, is groundless, and is nothing more than scaremongering, because, although there are policing problems in Tunisia, the country is ruled by an interim government that consists primarily of Ben Ali’s former colleagues (in other words, America’s long-standing allies in the region). Similarly, in Egypt, the interim government — the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces — consists of Mubarak’s former colleagues, even though, in the end, the army’s senior generals chose to seize power themselves rather than entrusting it to Hosni Mubarak’s chosen successor, Omar Suleiman.

As was noted before Mubarak’s fall, if there was to be meaningful change in Egypt, it could not involve Suleiman, the former spy chief who not only symbolized the brutality of Egypt’s police state to its own citizens, but was also central to the key role played by Egypt as a partner in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” personally overseeing the brutal torture of terror suspects seized by the CIA, including the Australian Mamdouh Habib, the Pakistani scholar Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, and the Libyan Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan. Under torture — almost certainly at Suleiman’s hands — al-Libi falsely confessed that Saddam Hussein had met two al-Qaeda operatives to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons, a tortured lie that, although retracted by al-Libi (who was later returned to Libya and a suspicious death by “suicide” in 2009), was used by the Bush administration to justify its illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell was persuaded to use it in a key presentation to the United Nations the month before.

Even so, positive perceptions of Omar Suleiman and Hosni Mubarak are at the heart of the US intelligence officials’ complaints about the changing political landscape in the Middle East. “Obviously, our most important relationship over the last decade has been Egypt,” a senior US intelligence official told the Wall Street Journal. “And clearly that is in line for significant change. We won’t re-create the relationship we had with Mubarak.”

Examining the importance of that relationship, the article proceeded to mention — with obvious approval — how, “Before this year’s revolts, the secret police in authoritarian countries like Egypt and Tunisia had far more leeway than the US and its European allies to hold detainees indefinitely and use interrogation methods widely regarded by human-rights groups as torture to try to extract information,” and that the Egyptian government also “secretly held and interrogated Islamist militants who had been captured by the CIA and the US military under a practice known as rendition, widely condemned by human-rights groups.”

Remove the careful caveats from the sentences above, and what you have is a clear statement that the US and at least some of its Western allies enjoyed the fact that, under Hosni Mubarak, prisoners could be kidnapped anywhere in the world and rendered to Egypt, where they could be detained indefinitely and tortured — and it is, to be honest, rather disturbing to be hearing US officials stating so openly, in 2011, how they wish that torture was still something they could use.

Why there is no threat from former Guantánamo prisoners in Libya or Yemen

With the US intelligence services’ love of torture exposed, and the misinformation about former prisoners in Tunisia and Egypt debunked, it is clear that the central premises of the Wall Street Journal article — that former Guantánamo prisoners, unmonitored, are on the loose in the Middle East, and that the governments responsible for monitoring them have either been toppled or are too distracted by their own revolutionary movements — do not stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

Moreover, looking at countries other than Tunisia and Egypt, similar problems can be perceived. The article, for example, also specifically mentioned Libya and Yemen. “The flow of information from Libya, Yemen and other governments in the region about the whereabouts and activities of the former Guantánamo detainees, along with other Islamists released from local prisons, has slowed or even stopped,” officials told the Wall Street Journal, adding that “they fear that former detainees will re-join al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups.”

Again, on close inspection, what is portrayed as a problem engendered by the revolutionary movements spreading across the Middle East, and also as one on a significant scale, is easily dismissed when the facts are introduced. In Libya, for example, where, rather terrifyingly, the counterterrorism relationship between the US and Gaddafi, another blatant torturer, was described by a senior US official as “especially productive,” only two former Guantánamo prisoners have been released, and as I explained in a recent article, “Deranged Gaddafi Blames Ex-Guantánamo Prisoners for Unrest in Libya, Even Though Only One Ex-Prisoner Has Been Released,” one of these men is still imprisoned in Tripoli, and the other, freed last summer, is verifiably not involved in any al-Qaeda activities. Nor, outside of wild claims by Colonel Gaddafi, has there been any serious suggestion that al-Qaeda, as such, is involved in the Libyan people’s uprising against their hated dictator, which, as elsewhere, is led primarily by young people rather than religious organizations, and supported by trade unionists and intellectuals.

With this in mind, it is noticeable that the Wall Street Journal‘s commentary on the Guantánamo prisoners repatriated to Libya was nothing more than a succession of errors. “In Libya, the US has been completely cut off,” the article claimed, citing an Obama administration official stating, “It’s dead with Gaddafi. We don’t know the status of the people [the returned prisoners].” The article then falsely claimed that both men had been returned in 2006, when one was returned in October 2007, and although it was correctly stated that, since their return, “US officials have paid multiple visits to the men in Libyan prisons,” it was, again, mistaken to suggest that, “once the uprising in Libya boiled over into a full-blown rebellion and the US called for Col. Moammar Gaddafi to step down, American officials lost track of the two men,” because, as indicated above, one remains in prison, and the other can easily be traced, and is very clearly no threat to anyone — as the Americans realized when they released him in 2007.

Similarly, in Yemen, the explicit claims made in the article that “US and European officials are increasingly concerned that former Guantánamo detainees are no longer under much, if any, government surveillance” is, fundamentally, nothing more than unjustifiable scaremongering. The authorities may well be concerned because they have, according to the article, “detected an uptick in activity by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” with a senior counterterrorism official claiming that “the group is ‘very actively’ plotting new strikes against the US during the lull in American and Yemeni counterterrorism operations” caused by the revolutionary upheavals in Yemen in the last two months.

However, this has nothing to do with the prisoners released from Guantánamo. According to US intelligence, a handful of Saudi ex-prisoners released by President Bush have been involved in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but only one Yemeni ex-prisoner — Hani Abdo Shaalan (aka Hani Abdu Shu’alan), released in June 2007 and apparently killed by Yemeni security forces in December 2009.

To get the Yemeni story in perspective, only 23 Yemeni prisoners have ever been released from Guantánamo, and in the last 15 months, just one Yemeni — Mohammed Hassan Odaini, a student seized by mistake while visiting other students in a university dormitory in Pakistan, who won his habeas corpus petition — has been freed.

Of the other 89 Yemenis still held in Guantánamo, 58 were cleared for release by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed all the Guantánamo cases throughout 2009, but they are still held because of an ongoing and open-ended moratorium on releasing any Yemenis, which was announced by President Obama in January 2010, after it was claimed that the failed plane bomber on Christmas Day 2009, the Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen.

Of the prisoners returned to Yemen, it is not actually difficult to establish that the overwhelming majority of them can be located easily, and are trying, with varying degrees of success, to rebuild their shattered lives. I recently, for example, spoke to David Remes, the attorney for several of the released prisoners, who told me about his recent meetings with them on a visit to Yemen, and updated me about their working lives, their hopes and aspirations, and their families.

Behind the headline-grabbing fears, this is the norm for Yemenis returned from Guantánamo, and the biggest problem Yemen causes to the US, when it comes to Guantánamo, is not those who have been released, but those who have not, because clearing men for release, and then not releasing them because of the perceived threat of terrorism from Yemen in general, tars the entire Yemeni population as terrorist sympathizers, and is, essentially, “guilt by nationality,” which is a deep insult to the Yemeni people, and a guaranteed basis for ill-feeling. In addition, as I have been explaining all year, it makes those held into political prisoners, no longer held because of any just or judicial process, but because of the whims of an unaccountable government.

If the US should draw one obvious lesson from what is happening throughout the Middle East, it ought to be that it is time for the paranoia and state-sanctioned violence of the “War on Terror” to be brought to an end. After all, Islamist militants have been conspicuously absent during the upheavals, which have been led primarily by young people, and the Islamic groups who have appeared have shown themselves willing to take part in the democratic process.

Nearly ten years after the 9/11 attacks, there is now an historic opportunity for the US to recognize that it is time to move on from a decade dominated by the lawlessness and brutality of al-Qaeda, and the lawlessness and brutality with which America responded, and to learn a lesson from the revolutionaries of the Middle East — that living in hope is far better than living in fear.

POSTSCRIPT April 3: A misleading article in the Wall Street Journal has focused on the role played in the resistance to Gaddafi by former opponents with alleged ties to al-Qaeda; specifically, Sufyan Ben Qumu (aka Abu Sufian Hamouda or Abu Sufian bin Qumu), the former Guantánamo prisoner who was freed from Libyan custody last year, after returning to Libya in 2007 and being subsequently imprisoned. Described by the Wall Street Journal as “training many of the city’s rebel recruits [in Darna],” which may be true, but sounds like an attempt to beef up a suggestion that he has volunteered to join the resistance to Gaddafi, it was also claimed that he was a “Libyan army veteran who worked for Osama bin Laden’s holding company in Sudan and later for an al Qaeda-linked charity in Afghanistan,” whereas, as I explained in a recent article:

[H]e had served in the Libyan army as a tank driver from 1979 to 1990, but was “arrested and jailed on multiple occasions for drug and alcohol offenses.” Having apparently escaped from prison in 1992, he fled to Sudan, where he worked as a truck driver. In an attempt to beef up the evidence against him, the Department of Defense alleged that the company he worked for, the Wadi al-Aqiq company, was “owned by Osama bin Laden,” and also attempted to claim that he joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group … even while admitting that an unidentified “al-Qaeda/LIFG facilitator” had described him as “a noncommittal LIFG member who received no training.”

After relocating to Pakistan, [he] apparently stayed there until the summer of 2001, when he and a friend crossed the border into Afghanistan, traveling to Jalalabad and then to Kabul, where [he] found a job working as an accountant for Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, the director of al-Wafa, a Saudi charity which provided humanitarian aid to Afghans, but which was regarded by the US authorities as a front for al-Qaeda … while working for al-Wafa, he traveled to Kunduz “to oversee the distribution of rice that was being guarded by four to five armed guards.” In Guantánamo, it seems, even the distribution of rice can be regarded as a component in a military operation.

Please note that no evidence was ever produced to establish that al-Wafa was “an al-Qaeda linked charity,” as the Wall Street Journal suggested so casually, and everyone connected with the organization, including al-Matrafi, was released from Guantánamo.

Fathi Messaoudi, the Tunisian dissident mentioned above, also told me that I was incorrect in describing Abdallah Hajji, the former Guantánamo prisoner freed in Tunisia following Ben Ali’s fall (after serving over three years of a sentence he was given after a show trial on his return in 2007), as a member of Ennahdha, even though that has been reported widely for many years. According to Messaoudi, Ennahdha members sought refuge in European countries, and none of them traveled to Afghanistan or Pakistan like other opponents of the regime.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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

While this anecdote rather chillingly demostrates Gaddafi’s disregard for human life — also demonstrated in his first speech against the revolution on February 22, when he urged supporters to “chase away the rats and terrorists” and threatened to “cleanse Libya house by house” — he also seems to have a tenuous grip on sanity, as revealed in his most recent speech, when, as CNN reported:

In another of his trademark lengthy, rambling speeches carried on state television, Gaddafi continued to claim that there are no peaceful Libyan protests, only al-Qaeda-backed efforts to tear the country apart. He blamed the problems on former prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who were released to Libya and then freed by Libyan authorities after they pledged to reform. He said they turned out to be members of al Qaeda sleeper cells — but insisted that his country is “stopping al- Qaeda from flourishing” and preventing Osama bin Laden from moving into North Africa.

Perhaps the mention of al-Qaeda was meant to reassure his former allies in the West that there was still some life in the discredited “War on Terror” that he joined so adroitly in 2004, but if this was his hope, he appears to have missed the fact that the popular uprisings in the Middle East are actually showing that all that was achieved by signing up to the “War on Terror” on the basis of a shared crusade with the US against terrorism was to alienate the people still further, as police states were reinforced and arms budgets increased, and the ordinary people — rather than spectral terrorists — were the ones who largely suffered.

In addition, even the most cursory investigation of the “former prisoners at Guantánamo Bay” reveals that only two Libyans have been repatriated since the prison opened over nine years ago, and that, of these two men, only one has been freed, and the other is still languishing in Abu Salim prison.

The man still held is Muhammad al-Rimi (also identified as Muhammad al-Futuri or Abdesalam Safrani), a refugee from the Gaddafi regime, who was repatriated from Guantánamo in December 2006, and the released man is certainly no al-Qaeda terrorist, as I reported at the time of his release, on August 31 last year, with 36 other men described as political prisoners. As I explained at the time:

They included a former Guantánamo prisoner transferred to Libyan custody nearly three years ago, in October 2007, named by AFP as Abu Sofian Ben Guemou, and by Reuters as Sofiane Ibrahim Gammu. Reuters noted that media reports had “quoted an official in the Gaddafi Foundation as saying Gammu was a former driver for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden,” but as he left the prison on Tuesday, he stated, “I am not bin Laden’s driver. It’s a misunderstanding.”

This was almost certainly true. Identified in Guantánamo as Abu Sufian Hamouda or Abu Sufian bin Qumu, his story, as revealed in publicly available documents, suggests that the bin Laden connection was only relevant in relation to a job that he took in Sudan for a company owned by bin Laden, when the al-Qaeda leader was involved in construction work and other activities unrelated to terrorism between 1992 and 1996, prior to his expulsion from Sudan and his return to Afghanistan.

As Hamouda explained in Guantánamo (and as I reported at the time of his transfer to Libyan custody):

[H]e had served in the Libyan army as a tank driver from 1979 to 1990, but was “arrested and jailed on multiple occasions for drug and alcohol offenses.” Having apparently escaped from prison in 1992, he fled to Sudan, where he worked as a truck driver. In an attempt to beef up the evidence against him, the Department of Defense alleged that the company he worked for, the Wadi al-Aqiq company, was “owned by Osama bin Laden,” and also attempted to claim that he joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group … even while admitting that an unidentified “al-Qaeda/LIFG facilitator” had described him as “a noncommittal LIFG member who received no training.”

After relocating to Pakistan, [he] apparently stayed there until the summer of 2001, when he and a friend crossed the border into Afghanistan, traveling to Jalalabad and then to Kabul, where [he] found a job working as an accountant for Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, the director of al-Wafa, a Saudi charity which provided humanitarian aid to Afghans, but which was regarded by the US authorities as a front for al-Qaeda.

In the years since Hamouda’s transfer to Libyan custody, everyone connected to al-Wafa, including Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, has been released, but in any case, as I also explained at the time:

[His] involvement with the organization centered on its humanitarian work … In the “evidence” presented for his Combatant Status Review Tribunal — under factors purporting to demonstrate that he “supported military operations against the United States or its coalition partners” — it was stated that, while working for al-Wafa, he traveled to Kunduz “to oversee the distribution of rice that was being guarded by four to five armed guards.” In Guantánamo, it seems, even the distribution of rice can be regarded as a component in a military operation.

I also explained:

Captured in Islamabad, after fleeing from Afghanistan following the US-led invasion, [he] was held for a month by the Pakistani authorities, and was then handed over to the Americans, who began mining him for the flimsy “evidence” of terrorist activities outlined above. Earlier this year [2007], he was cleared for release, and, despite misgivings on the part of his lawyers, stated that he was prepared to return to Libya, even though what awaits him may not be any better than what he was suffered over the last five years. Perhaps, as one of Guantánamo’s truly lost men, he has decided that, if he is to spend the rest of his life in prison for no apparent reason, he would rather be in Libya, where his wife and his family might be able to see him, than in Guantánamo, where, like every other detainee, he was more isolated from his relatives than even the deadliest convicted mass murderer on the US mainland.

In September 2008, Human Rights Watch stated in a report that, according to the US State Department, officials had visited Hamouda in December 2007, and that, although the Libyan security forces “were holding him on unknown charges and apparently without access to a lawyer … he did not complain of maltreatment [and] was scheduled to receive a family visit” at the end of the month. The Gaddafi Foundation [founded by one of Gaddafi's sons, Saif al-Islam, with the avowed intention of supporting charitable work and upholding human rights] subsequently claimed that he had indeed been “granted a family visit,” and added that the foundation was providing an apartment for his family in Tripoli.

It would, of course, be useful if other media outlets bothered to research Gaddafi’s wild claims, but it would be prudent to expect, instead, that the “al-Qaeda in Libya” narrative will drizzle its way insiduously into discussions about Libya’s future — not aided, it must be said, by comments that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made on Wednesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

After stating, “One of our biggest concerns is Libya descending into chaos and becoming a giant Somalia,” Clinton proceeded to express “her concern about the number of al-Qaeda recruits that have come from Libya,” as ABC News described it, “suggesting the power vacuum that could result from the unrest in that country could be ripe for exploitation from terror groups,” as happened in Somalia.

With these words, Clinton demonstrated that the tired rhetoric of the “War on Terror” — in which exiled political opponents of Gaddafi were automatically labelled as al-Qaeda, to Gaddafi’s benefit — is not only a lie to which a desperate tyrant clings, but is also a lie that is still being kept alive in the corridors of power in the US, where some hawkish types are already looking for an opportunity to see terrorists where, as the actual record inconveniently shows, there are none.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

Libya is united in popular revolution — please don’t intervene
By Muhammad min Libya, The Guardian, March 1, 2011

“Kiss my mum goodbye for me, and tell her that her son died a hero,” said my friend Ahmed, 26, to the first person who rushed to his side after he was shot in a Tripoli street.

Two days later, my friend Ahmed died in the hospital. Just like that.

That tall, handsome, funny, witty, intellectual young man is no more. No longer will he answer my phone calls. Time will stand still on his Facebook account for ever.

An hour before he was shot, I called Ahmed. He sounded at his best. He told me that he was in Green Square in the heart of Tripoli, and that we were free. Then bad telephone connections meant I couldn’t reach him again for two whole days.

That was when I called Ahmed’s best friend, who broke the devastating news to me. They were about to bury him, he told me. I rushed to the cemetery, and arrived there right after the burial. I found some of our friends. They pointed at a spot on the ground telling me it was where Ahmed’s body lay. We all hugged each other and just cried our hearts out.

This is the kind of story you get out of Tripoli these days. Hundreds of them, perhaps even thousands. The kind of stories that you could never imagine on your doorstep.

Like when you hear a six-month-old baby has been murdered, you just hope with all your heart that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s claims turn out to be true that there’s precious little violence here, that al-Jazeera fabricated the story. You hope that infant is right now sleeping peacefully in his mother’s arms. Like when you hear of someone from Tajura who had a bullet in his head for two days before dying, leaving behind a bereaved wife and child. You have been praying to God that this father be there playing with his child. But the photos, the video show you the cold truth. The wails that need no translation: loved ones being snatched away by death. All humans understand that scream.

This has been the life of Tripoli for quite some time. This is why the city is now called the “City of Ghosts” by its inhabitants, who have despaired at seeing protesters flee the teargas. The city has ground to a halt, with the vast majority of shops closed and schools and universities shut down. Only a few shops selling basic supplies remain open, and even that only for a few hours each day.

But despite this bleak picture of Tripoli, people have high hopes and faith that we are now witnessing the last moments of Gaddafi’s regime. This man no longer rules Libya; he is merely a man with a gun turned to the people.

His two speeches, and his son’s before that, were nothing but threats — they all backfired in favour of the Libyan revolution. Libyan tribes from the east to the west went out to assert national unity.

Abroad his record is no better. Gaddafi wanted to scare the western world off with the alleged threat of an Islamic emirate. The international community answered him by barring him from exile abroad, freezing his assets and referring his regime’s crimes to the international court of justice with almost unprecedented international unanimity.

All Libyans, even the pro-Gaddafi minority, believe that it’s only a matter of time before Libya regains its freedom. But the frightening question remains: how many martyrs will fall before Gaddafi does? How many souls will he take before the curse is broken?

This happy ending, however, is marred by a fear shared by all Libyans; that of a possible western military intervention to end the crisis.

Don’t get me wrong. I, like most Libyans, believe that imposing a no-fly zone would be a good way to deal the regime a hard blow on many levels; it would cut the route of the mercenary convoys summoned from Africa, it would prevent Gaddafi from smuggling money and other assets, and most importantly it would stop the regime from bombing weapons arsenals that many eyewitnesses have maintained contain chemical weapons; something that would unleash an unimaginable catastrophe, not to mention that his planes might actually carry such weapons.

Nevertheless, one thing seems to have united Libyans of all stripes; any military intervention on the ground by any foreign force would be met — as Mustafa Abud Al Jeleil, the former justice minister and head of the opposition-formed interim government, said — with fighting much harsher than what the mercenaries themselves have unleashed.

Nor do I favour the possibility of a limited air strike for specific targets. This is a wholly popular revolution, the fuel to which has been the blood of the Libyan people. Libyans fought alone when western countries were busy ignoring their revolution at the beginning, fearful of their interests in Libya. This is why I’d like the revolution to be ended by those who first started it: the people of Libya.

So as the calls for foreign intervention grow, I’d like to send a message to western leaders: Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy. This is a priceless opportunity that has fallen into your laps, it’s a chance for you to improve your image in the eyes of Arabs and Muslims. Don’t mess it up. All your previous programmes to bring the east and the west closer have failed, and some of them have made things even worse. Don’t start something you cannot finish, don’t turn a people’s pure revolution into some curse that will befall everyone. Don’t waste the blood that my friend Ahmed spilt for me.

Let us just live as neighbours on the same planet. Who knows, maybe I as your neighbour might one day show up at your doorstep to happily shake your hand.

• This article was commissioned and translated in cooperation with Meedan.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

In an article a month ago, Torture and Despair: The Psychic Roots of the Revolution in Tunisia, Egypt and Across the Middle East, I attempted to analyze and understand the symbolic power of the revolutionary movements that were sprerading like wildfire across the Middle East, recognizing that, in the case of Tunisia — where it all began just ten weeks ago — it was the self-immolation, in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, of Mohamed Bouazizi. 26 years old and universty educated, Bouazizi had been surviving by selling fruit and vegetables in the street without a licence, but when the authorities stopped him and confiscated his produce, he was so angry that he set himself on fire, and his death — and its symbolic significance to a people robbed of hope and humiliated by the dictatorial regime of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali — led to rapidly escalating protests that, in just 17 days, led to the flight of Ben Ali.

In Egypt, a similar trigger was the cold-blooded murder, in a street in Alexandria last June, of Khaled Said, a 28-year old businessman from Alexandria, who was beaten to death by the police after they dragged him onto the street from an internet café. Said’s murder led to the creation of an Internet campaign — for justice, essentially — in his name (We Are All Khaled Said), and, as I explained in my article last month, I considered that:

[A]lthough brutality was widespread in Tunisia too, it is appropriate that the Egyptian people are holding the memory of a victim of the state’s appalling violence as an inspiration, because Mubarak’s brutality — exercised in Egypt’s torture prisons, as well as in casual homicides like that of Khaled Said — is not only an emblem of Egypt over the last 30 years, but also reflects on wider issues that have, indirectly, dominated my life for the last five years since I began researching and writing about Guantánamo and the Bush administration’s “War on Terror”: the hypocrisy of the West (and, in particular, the United States), which funds Mubarak’s repressive regime (to the tune of $1.3 billion a year), and which made Egypt central to the “War on Terror,” its vile torture prisons the first port of call for victims of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program.

In her report for Channel 4 News, Lindsey Hilsum (following a lead established by others in recent days, including Foreign Policy, the New York Times, TIME and Middle East Online) has — correctly, I believe — identified the Abu Salim prison massacre as the symbolic trigger for the uprising in Libya, beginning her article as follows (emphasis added):

As I took off my shoes to enter the house, I realised this would be emotional.

About a dozen women and men were sitting on sofas around the living room, each silently holding up a photograph of a son, a brother, a husband, a father.

They were relatives of some of those killed in the most notorious massacre of Colonel Gaddafi’s rule, when security guards machine-gunned 1,200 men in Abu Salim prison in 1996. It was their story which sparked the uprising in Benghazi.

Specifically, the trigger was the arrest in Benghazi on February 15 of Fathi Terbil, a lawyer who represents the families of those killed in the Abu Salim massacre, and who lost three family members, including his brother, in the massacre. As NPR reported, “For years, he held an often solitary weekly protest in front of the courthouse, demanding justice,” and “was arrested seven times” and “repeatedly tortured.” On February 15, however, his arrest (even though he was subsequently released) prompted thousands of people to protest, igniting an unstoppable movement within just 24 hours. He told Hilsum:

We, the Abu Salim families, ignited the revolution. The Libyan people were ready to rise up because of the injustice they experienced in their lives, but they needed a cause. So calling for the release of people, including me, who had been arrested became the justification for their protest.

In a more prosaic sense, the trigger for Libya’s uprising, as with the uprising in Egypt and Tunisia, was the steady mobilization of disaffected youth, professionals and trade unionists over a rather longer period of time, and, with particular reference to Tunisia, the extraordinary speed with which an overwhelming number of Tunisians drowned Ben Ali’s hopes of retaliating. This was something that then inspired similar actions in Tahrir Square in Cairo (often with extraordinary fearlessness) and across Egypt, and that has also gripped the east of Libya and spread to other towns and cities, and is erupting in southern Yemen and elsewhere in the region.

However, while Tunisia will forever provide the example of revolution through overwhelming numbers — an example that continues to provide inspiration not only throughout the Middle East, but also globally — I believe that a symbolic trigger is needed to be the emotional heart of these revolutionary movements, and to draw in people from all walks of life, and that, in the memory of the Abu Salim prison massacre, Gaddafi faces a nemesis that has been building for nearly 15 years, and that he cannot defeat by force.

Lindsey Hilsum’s article is cross-posted below:

Meeting the families left behind by Gaddafi’s prison massacre
By Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4 News, March 1, 2011

As I took off my shoes to enter the house, I realised this would be emotional.

About a dozen women and men were sitting on sofas around the living room, each silently holding up a photograph of a son, a brother, a husband, a father.

They were relatives of some of those killed in the most notorious massacre of Colonel Gaddafi’s rule, when security guards machine-gunned 1,200 men in Abu Salim prison in 1996. It was their story which sparked the uprising in Benghazi.

For years, the families continued to take food and clothing to the prison, believing that –- although they weren’t allowed to see their relatives –- they were still there being held without trial on suspicion of opposing the government.

“We did this for 14 years before we were told that he was dead,” said Fouad Assad ben Omran, a grizzled old man in a traditional dark red hat, whose brother-in-law was amongst the victims.

“They told us he was there, but we weren’t allowed see him. The government said we could come every second month, and we used to spend a day or two at the gate.”

An elderly woman in black wept as she showed me a handwritten letter from her son. She had framed it. She thrust a passport-size photograph of a plump-faced boy into my hands. He looked about 20. Two years ago, after 12 years of denial and silence, the government gave her a death certificate. It simply said he had died in Tripoli in 1996. That’s all.

Over the years, information has came out in dribs and drabs, as people have been released from Abu Salim. In the 1980s and 90s thousands of men were arrested all over Libya and taken to gaol in Tripoli. Some were Islamists, others secular opponents of the regime, still others just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their conditions were abysmal, and in June 1996 they protested.

“They said ‘we want better conditions because even animals cannot live like this,’” said Faiza Ahmed Zubi, whose brother was killed. “They didn’t even ask for release but just to be treated like prisoners elsewhere. They said ‘we want to breathe, to see the sun, to live.’”

After a few days, according to Human Rights Watch (who investigated in 2004), Colonel Gaddafi’s brother-in-law Abdullah Sanussi sent negotiators to the prison, but instead of holding discussions, Sanussi allegedly sent troops armed with machine-guns onto the prison roof and ordered them to shoot the men assembled in the courtyard.

Just as the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988 was the clearest example of Saddam Hussein’s brutality, so Abu Salim is the atrocity which defines Colonel Gaddafi’s 42-year misrule.

Over the last four years, the families in Benghazi have demonstrated every Saturday, demanding justice and answers. Where are the bodies? Who was responsible? Who will pay?

When their lawyer, Fathi Terbil, was arrested on 15 February, they came out again, but this time, thousands of others joined them. This was the spark that lit the fuse in Benghazi.

“We, the Abu Salim families, ignited the revolution,” he told me. “The Libyan people were ready to rise up because of the injustice they experienced in their lives, but they needed a cause. So calling for the release of people, including me, who had been arrested became the justification for their protest.”

Mr Terbil still fears for his life, believing that Colonel Gaddafi’s agents could still be in Benghazi.

Every day more photos appear outside the courthouse, where Benghazi’s new anti-Gaddafi administration is based.

Some families have been so terrified for so long, they’ve never before dared to admit that their relative had disappeared.

After Colonel Gaddafi gave up his weapons of mass destruction –- and compensated the Lockerbie families –- he was rehabilitated internationally. Tony Blair came to visit. The Colonel travelled to Italy. But people I’ve met in Benghazi are not prepared to forgive and forget.

They blame him for the murder of their sons and brothers, and this uprising is their demand not just for freedom, but for justice.

Note: See here for the website of Cairo-based photojournalist David Degner, who took the photo of Fathi Terbil above.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

This was a fascinating interview, available below in two parts, via YouTube, and in it I had the opportunity to express my hope that, if given the opportunity, through the fall of the Gaddafi regime, the Libyan people will be able to rebuild their country, even though the necessary institutions are less evident in Libya than in Tunisia and Egypt, given the tribal nature of the country and Gaddafi’s obsession with accruing all power to himself and his family.

Even so, the fall of Gaddafi is not yet assured. The dictator made a defiant appearance in Tripoli yesterday, in which he vowed to “open all the arsenals,” and his security forces opened fire on anti-government protesters after prayers on Friday. On the February 17 Voices audioboo channel, a woman in Tripoli described how government forces pursued protesters into their homes to kill them, and also claimed that the dead had been buried immediately by Gaddafi’s soldiers in an attempt to cover up their atrocities.Nevertheless, the Guardian reported today that anti-government protests were continuing across Libya, and that in Tripoli “protesters are reported to have taken control of some areas of the city.”

In addition, defections from the regime “seemed to be accelerating,” according to the Guardian, which noted, “Envoys to Portugal and Sweden renounced Gaddafi, with the ambassador to Lisbon, Ali Ibrahim Emdored, telling AP he was leaving ‘due to the killing of my people by this fascist regime,’” and in Geneva, the Libyan delegation to the UN Human Rights Council (which stated that it “strongly condemns the recent gross and systematic human rights violations committed in Libya”, and called for Libya’s membership to be revoked) asked for a moment of silence in the chamber to “honour this revolution.” One envoy, Adel Shaltut, whose contribution “drew thunderous applause,” declared, “We in the Libyan mission have categorically decided to serve as representatives of the Libyan people and their free will. We only represent the Libyan people.”

In my interview, I was particularly concerned to express to Ernest my belief that, if Gaddafi falls, countless capable Libyans, currently in exile, will, if possible, be delighted to return to their home country to help rebuild it, and also to express my hope that, with no Islamist bogeyman for the West to pin its fears on, and to cynically incorporate into the “War on Terror,” as has been the case since the 9/11 attacks (and with particular cynicism in Libya), the globally connected young people, and the professional people who are already beginning to reshape Benghazi and other towns and cities, will be able to construct a new Libya, and will not be prevented from doing so by Western powers who will end up sacrificing them yet again, supporting dictators to protect their precious business interests and their distorted security concerns.

Ernest was not hopeful about this, but although the international community has been generally preoccupied with evacuating its citizens from Libya, condemnation of the regime — however hypocritical in some cases — has been reasonably swift. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, was the first world leader to openly demand Gaddafi’s capitulaltion, the European Union agreed to freeze the assets of those connected to the regime and to impose an arms embargo, President Obama issued an executive order seizing assets and blocking any deals regarding property in the US belonging to Gaddafi or his sons, and made a statement specifying that the measures were targeted against the Gaddafi government and not the wealth of the Libyan people, and today the UN Security Council will meet again to decide what action to take against Gaddafi, whch, as the Guardian explained, “could include an arms embargo against the government, a travel ban and asset freeze against the Libyan ruler, his relatives and close allies, and referring the violent crackdown to the International Criminal Court so it can investigate possible crimes against humanity.”

The Guardian also reported that the British, the leading hypocrites when Gaddafi came onside in the “War on Terror,” as I explained in my article, Revolution in Libya: Protestors Respond to Gaddafi’s Murderous Backlash with Remarkable Courage; US and UK Look Like the Hypocrites They Are, were “contacting senior Libyan regime figures directly to persuade them to desert Muammar Gaddafi or face trial alongside him for crimes against humanity.”

My hope — as it has been since the Tunisian people first rose up against their dictator, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, followed by the Egyptian people against Hosni Mubarak — is that the hunger of the Libyan people for a new life is so strong, and involves so many people, that backsliding and betrayals on the part of the West will not be possible, and that we really are seeing the beginning of a new world order — one shaped by the people, and not by the corporations, bankers and governments who have done so much to oppress the people of the Middle East.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

In Libya itself, there is no room for reflection on the hypocrisy of whey-faced imbeciles like David Cameron, as the regime and its opponents continue to be engaged in a bloody battle for control of the country. Below, I cross-post an excellent article by the Guardian‘s Martin Chulov, the first Western journalist to visit the eastern city of Benghazi, where the revolution began just days ago, and where, as he explained, government buildings have been looted and butrned, and Gaddafi’s soldiers have defected en masse, and where, as he reported today, “a makeshift organising committee of judges, lawyers and other professionals” is now running the city, sending young people out “to direct traffic and restore basic order.” A high court lawyer, Amal Bagaigis, told Chulov, “We started just as lawyers looking for our rights and now we are revolutionaries, and we don’t know how to manage. We want to have our own face. For 42 years we lived with this kind of barbarianism. We now want to live by ourselves.” A follow-up article by Chulov, examining how lawyers, doctors and engineers are attempting “to take the city’s destiny into their hands,” is also cross-posted below.

Over the last few days, Gaddafi’s embattled regime has suffered blow after blow, even as the dictator has responded with brute force, gunning down protestors, and bringing in mercenaries to do the killing that the military, it seems, is increasingly unwilling to do. Politically, “Libyan and Arab sources said the biggest blow to Gaddafi so far had been the defection of his interior minister and veteran loyalist, Abdel-Fatah Younes al-Obeidi,” who, as the Guardian explained, “called on the army on Tuesday to ‘serve the people and support the revolution and its legitimate demands.’”

Other notable defectors include the justice minister, Mustafa Mohamed Abud Jalil, who revealed that Gaddafi had “personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing,”  Ahmed Gadhaf al-Dam, a cousin of Gaddafi’s and formerly one of his closest aides, who “announced on Thursday that he had defected to Egypt in protest against the bloody crackdown,” as the New York Times described it, Youssef Sawan, who, expressing “dismay against violence,”, resigned as the director of the Gaddafi International Charitable Foundation run by Saif al-Islam (Gaddafi’s supposedly moderate, reformist son, who has, nevertheless, been stoutly defending the regime in recent days), Ali al-Sahouli, a senior figure in the revolutionary committees, and numerous diplomats around the world.

In addition, defence minister General Abu-Bakr Yunis Jaber, who is also the commander of the army, was put under house arrest, and Major General Suleiman Mahmoud, the army commander in Tobruk, defected. Al-Jazeera reported that he said, “We are on the side of the people. I was with him [Gaddafi] in the past but the situation has changed — he’s a tyrant.” Other military units also defected, and it was also reported that a batallion of Gaddafi’s special forces had attacked Gaddafi’s revolutionary guard in Benghazi.

This was perhaps the most significant news in terms of a military defection, because, as the New York Times explained, Gaddafi always kept the Libyan military too “weak and divided” to turn on him effectively, relying instead on “an elaborate paramilitary force — accompanied by special segments of the regular army that report primarily to his family,” which was “designed to check the army and in part to subdue his own population.” The Times added, “At the top of that structure is his roughly 3,000-member revolutionary guard corps, which mainly guards him personally,” plus militia units controlled by his seven sons, and, perhaps most significantly, the force of “about 2,500 mercenaries from countries like Chad, Sudan and Niger that he calls his Islamic Pan African Brigade,” hastily recalled from Sudan and other countries, who appear to have been at the forefront of the killings, with at least a thousand people so far presumed to have been killed.

Speaking from the east of the country, Al-Jazeera correspondent Hoda Abdel-Hamid said that, all along the border, “we didn’t see one policeman, we didn’t see one soldier and people here told us they [security forces] have all fled or are in hiding and that the people are now in charge, meaning all the way from the border, Tobruk, and then all the way up to Benghazi.” She added, “People tell me it’s also quite calm in Bayda and Benghazi. They do say, however, that ‘militias’  are roaming around, especially at night. They describe them as African men, they say they speak French so they think they’re from Chad.”

In terms of the struggle for control of the country, with Benghazi and the east in the revolutionaries’ hands, protests spread to the port of Misurata, Libya’s third-largest city, to the nearby town of Sirte, Gaddafi’s home town, where, as the Guardian explained, “a key tribe has reportedly come out in support of what is being called the 17 February revolution,” and to Sebrata and Zawiya in the west. Al-Jazeera also reported that, in the Azzintan and Nalut areas, also in the west of the country, the tribes had come out against Gaddafi, and that they had taken over control of the area’s oil facilities.

Today it was reported that Misurata had fallen to the revolution, with one resident, Abdul Basit Imzivig, telling the Guardian that “regime forces had fled overnight and the city was in opposition hands.” Despite a claim that pro-Gaddafi forces had launched a counter-attack, lawyers and judges said in a statement issued through the Internet that they were in control of the city, and that they had removed agents of the “oppressive regime” with help from “honest” military officers.

The Guardian also reported that all the oilfields in the south of the country had fallen to the revolutionaries, and Moustafa Raba’a, a mechanical engineer with the Sirte oil company, said that production had been closed down “to send a message to Gaddafi to stop the slaying of our people in Benghazi. We made a decision to deny him the privilege of exporting oil and gas to Europe.”

The key to Gaddafi’s overthrow, of course, is Tripoli, the capital, where, if the Guardian is correct, his influence is “confined to parts of the capital and steadily shrinking.” The Los Angeles Times reported that protesters “plan a huge rally in Tripoli after Friday prayers,” and around the capital, the noose appears to be tightening. Zuara, 75 miles to the west, has reportedly fallen to the revolution, although, as the Los Angeles Times also reported, “Foreign residents fleeing the city emerged with grim tales of fighting in the streets.” Hassan Sheikh, an Egyptian laborer fleeing for the Tunisian border, said, “The situation there is very bad. There is no mercy there. They killed many people.” Other witnesses said that “armed militiamen [had] roamed the streets, killing people with guns and swords.”

There were also reports of clashes in the town of Az-Zawiyah, just 30 miles west of Tripoli, where, according to the New York Times, “government opponents had briefly claimed victory,” until Gaddafi’s forces forces — “a mixture of special brigades and African mercenaries — fought back, blasting a mosque that had been used as a refuge by protesters.” A Libyan exile heard that Gaddafi’s forces began their attack at about 5 am, and that the ensuing battle lasted four hours, and led to the death of around 100 rebels, who were armed only with hunting rifles.

Below are Martin Chulov’s reports from Benghazi.

Inside Libya’s first free city: jubilation fails to hide deep wounds
Martin Chulov, The Guardian, February 23, 2011

At the heart of the city where he launched his rise to power, Muammar Gaddafi’s indignity is now complete. In little more than three days of rampage, the rebels in Libya’s second city have done their best to wind the clock back 42 years –- to life before the dictator they loathe.

Benghazi has fallen and Gaddafi’s bid to cling on to power, whatever the cost, has crumbled with it. There is barely a trace of him now, except for obscene graffiti that mocks him on the dust-strewn walls where his portraits used to hang.

Residents who would not have dared to approach the town’s main military base without an invitation were doing victory laps around it in their cars. Every barrack block inside had been torched and looted. The stage where Gaddafi would address the masses on the rare occasions that he came here had collapsed. His house across the road had been ransacked and there wasn’t a loyalist soldier inside.

“He is gone. A dragon has been slain,” cried Ahmed Al-Fatuuir outside the secret police headquarters. “Now he has to explain where all the bodies are.”

The Middle East’s longest ruling autocrat seems disinclined to do that, or to go quietly. His rambling speech on Tuesday night, in which he vowed to die in his homeland as a “martyr”, has convinced many in Benghazi that although they may have ousted their foe from eastern Libya, they have not seen the last of the bloodshed.

At the city’s hospitals, administrators are still tallying the toll from the most savage fighting seen here in decades. At the al-Jala hospital, at least 65 deaths have been recorded since 17 February, along with dozens of injuries, many of them horrific. And they are still coming in.

A Libyan soldier, who along with many of his colleagues had joined the anti-government insurgency, was pronounced dead as the Guardian arrived inside the overworked intensive care unit. A small bullet wound near his right kidney had caused irreversible chaos inside his body.

“They are still out there,” said the doctor who pronounced him dead. “These mercenaries who are hired by Gaddafi are lurking in the shadows.”

Wherever they are hiding, they must be running out of arms. All day defecting troops and officers were lugging in thousands of pounds of ammunition to a courtyard inside the secret police headquarters on Bengazi’s waterfront. By the day’s end an arsenal that could easily supply an army brigade was piled up. There were plastic explosives, rockets, machine guns and even the anti-aircraft weapon that was used to mow down demonstrators as they assaulted the military base on Sunday.

Evidence of the carnage it caused was clear on the walls of nearby buildings and in the mortuaries. Doctors had used their mobile phones to capture the carnage that was caused by military weapons on human flesh. And they coolly displayed the aftermath of the battle, denouncing Gaddafi as a criminal as they did so.

Nearby Filipino orderlies were putting the finishing touches to the short life of a dead soldier, washing his body with a clinical calm and slowly readying a green body bag. It was a process they were clearly familiar with. ” Too many times, too many times,” said one orderly as he rested on a trolley. “It has been terrible in here.”

At least 232 demonstrators in Benghazi are believed to have been killed since the uprising began and up to 1,000 injured. There are no reliable figures on the number of soldiers or mercenaries killed during the assault of the barracks, or in the hours of chaos that followed.

One thing that is clear is that this was not a peaceful stroll through the streets of Bahrain, as has largely been the case on the other side of the Arabian peninsula. This was a savage rampage on both sides, a blood and guts revolution, fuelled by decades of repression, neglect and rage. There has been nothing peaceful about it.

Testimony to the protesters’ vehemence is dotted all around the base, in the form of bulldozers stolen from nearby worksites that were used to breach the walls. At least six of them stand burned and mangled near where their work had been successfully done — gaping holes in whitewashed walls that allowed protesters to storm through.

“That is where the anti-aircraft gun was and that is where all the African mercenaries were found dead,” said Mohamed Fatah, who was part of the throng that attacked the base. “The people were leading a funeral march past the big roundabout and people from inside the base opened fire,” he said. “They went home, gathered themselves and came back. This is what happened.”

Gaddafi’s reported use of mercenaries appears to have tipped the hand of many protesters and armed forces. “That is why we turned against the government,” said air force major Rajib Feytouni. “That and the fact that there was an order to use planes to attack the people.”

Workers at an oil refinery 120 miles west of Benghazi said that they had seen an air force jet crash nearby and two parachutes land. There were widespread reports that those on board had refused to carry out an order to attack the east of the country.

The reports could not be independently verified. However, Feytouni confirmed that an air force base to the east had been hit on Sunday by two bombs dropped from a jet. “They were trying to make sure that the weapons did not end up in the hands of the opposition,” he said.

He added that he had personally witnessed 4,000-5,000 mercenaries flown into his air force base on Libyan military transport planes, beginning on about 14 February — several days before the uprising started.

“They [the planes] had 300 men at a time, all of them coming out with weapons,” he said. “They were all from Africa: Ghanaians, Kenyans.”

Several of the alleged soldiers of fortune are being held in a jail at the top of the ransacked courthouse on Benghazi’s corniche. One was briefly brought to meet the Guardian. He was quickly ushered away by lawyers who said he was not allowed to speak until the case against him was finished.

But the court of public opinion on the heaving street below had already convicted the unnamed African, along with anyone else linked to what they believe are the dying days of 42 years of sadistic oppression. There was no sign of any pro-regime figures. And even those who have recently defected, such as the country’s justice minister, are not prepared to show their faces publicly, fearing the reactions from a combustible street.

The mood of people fluctuated easily between nervousness and violence; warmth and zeal. The first western reporters seen in the city since law and order collapsed were embraced almost as liberators. At some points during the morning and at the hospital, it was difficult to move without people eagerly thrusting in our faces more macabre images of dead people or missing relatives.

“His time will come,” said one man brandishing a simple sign that said in English: “Freedom for Libya”. He added: “You are welcome here. The world needs to see what is happening.”

Along the long and winding way from the Salum crossing from Egypt, there was not an official to be seen.

Neighbourhood Watch-like groups, all armed with AK-47s, manned checkpoints in and out of all the towns. But every military and police post for 360 miles had been abandoned. The scattering of the police was leading to claims of victory and the feeling of triumphalism among many of the city’s young people.

The deathly emptiness of a rainy morning in a city under siege had by dusk given way to teaming streets and jubilant cheers. Celebratory burst from AK-47s cracked into the air thoughout the afternoon — always a disconcerting sound in a war zone.

The jubilation did little to hide Benghazi’s wounds, though. Here, more than in the capital, Tripoli, or Gaddafi’s other strongholds, mainly in the west, society remains brutalised and stagnant, a drab decaying old-order feel, much like Iraq in 2004.

“Here hospitals are nothing like in Tripoli,” said an intensive care nurse who identified herself as Fatima. “It is first world there, but we have to make do.”

It’s the same with government buildings — what remains of them. There is barely a typewriter left, let alone a computer or the basic tools of administration.

Neglect had been a clear strategy for Gaddafi for a city that had in 1969 deeply resented the coup he launched against the monarch, King Idris, and has not forgiven him since. The independent flag last flown 42 years ago has become a prominent symbol of this revolution. It flies above key government buildings and even hospitals and it is worn as a badge by most organisers.

Benghazi feels Libya’s time has come. Residents are adamant that the leader who forgot them has days, or perhaps weeks, left as president. “He can’t survive and he won’t survive,” one man shouted outside the courthouse. “He is deluded and he is cruel. He will attack us again even though everyone knows he is finished.”

The city has little sense of what is happening in the west of the country where Gaddafi still appears to be in control of at least large parts of the capital.

Meanwhile, many of the 1.5 million foreigners still in Libya are scrambling for the border, or waiting from help from their governments. Several passenger ferries are waiting in the choppy waters off the coast of Benghazi for any evacuation order. And the Salum border crossing to Egypt is a chaotic scramble of fleeing Egyptians who overran the arrival hall on Tuesday evening as the Guardian was trying to enter Libya. Riot police were moved into position but weren’t used.

The international community again appears hamstrung by the man it had spent decades trying to rehabilitate. Leverage is limited and options are few.

“The people of the international community had been helping their governments to help the assassin,” said an orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Shakir, in al–Jala hospital. “And that only because the assassin and his government is helping them. That is a flawed logic.”

So far reactions to the gathering storm here, which may soon lead to the overthrow of the third Arab autocrat in less than three months, has been to renounce the volatile leader and the compulsive savagery he is launching as his legacy melts away.

But there remains a gnawing fear that the worst may be yet to come. “Of course it is true,” Saad Achmed, a 24-year-old student, said. “If he feels he is cornered he will come for us. Those roads you came in on may be clear, but you did not see who is hiding over the hills? We have won the big battle, but that does not mean the war is won just yet.”

Benghazi the nerve centre as Libya protest turns to revolution
Martin Chulov, The Guardian, February 24, 2011

The nerve centre of Libya’s revolution is an anxious place indeed. At the heart of Benghazi’s courthouse, a building that claimed to stand for justice through Gaddafi’s reign, groups of civilian professionals — lawyers, doctors, surgeons and engineers — find themselves at the heart of the movement that is throwing off his despotic yoke.

“We decided to protest last week, for our rights,” a lawyer told the Guardian. “And suddenly everything changed. It turned from a protest to a revolution. We don’t have any experience in this,” she said.

All around her people swirled with documents, mobile phones and momentous news from afar. The town of Zawya fell today, a messenger rushed in to say. Shortly afterwards came word of Masrat, a city halfway to Tripoli that also seems to be falling to the rebels, then the three largest oil fields around Benghazi. The speed of events was staggering.

Five days after Benghazi was sacked, Libya seems to be falling quicker than anyone in Benghazi expected, or prepared for. History has overtaken those who find themselves running the revolt. “And it’s causing me a lot of stress,” said the lawyer. “We are worried about the people in Tripoli, food and other supplies. We need to co-ordinate everything. There is a lot of responsibility.”

Her colleague Amal Bagaigis agreed. “We started just as lawyers looking for our rights and now we are revolutionaries. And we don’t know how to manage. We want to have our own face. For 42 years we have this kind of babarianism. We now want to live.”

Almost a week after a series of rolling demonstrations became a full-blown revolt, the country’s detested old guard now seems confined to a shrinking region near the capital. Gaddafi’s grinding reign is widely despised and openly mocked, and the ruined part of the country that has freed itself of him is very much in the mood for re-invention.

“We could be anything now,” said one man outside the courthouse where the overwrought professionals upstairs were trying to usher the revolution westwards. “He kept us down because he didn’t want anyone to threaten him. That’s how despots have always worked. When Libyans get a chance to achieve things, we can be the best in the region.”

Thousands gather on the road outside the courthouse each day. By night their numbers swell at least tenfold. Here, wedged between the storm-tossed Mediterranean and a building that once stood as a pillar of the regime, they chant anti-regime slogans, fire guns into the air and hold two fingers skywards in Churchillian “V for Victory” style.

The people are clearly looking for direction from the city’s new custodians. And they seem more confident than the professionals are in their ability to get things done.

“This city has a good spirit,” said Ahmed al-Sereti, on the rain-soaked street below. “Everyone is doing what they can to make sure things don’t slip backwards. There has been no stealing, no looting [apart from government offices, all of which have been sacked]. And people know that this event has changed everything.”

The primary concern in Benghazi has been security. But with eager youths manning traffic lights and residents patiently queuing outside banks in the vain hope that they may open soon, there is no sign of frustration or fear. Relief and euphoria seem to be driving this place. The people’s awareness that Benghazi’s destiny is in their own hands for the first time in four decades is clearly empowering.

“I came back three months ago,” said Haithem Gheriani, an Irish-trained surgeon. “And I’m really glad I did. To find myself at the centre of an event in my own country that is so important, so liberating, is a terrific feeling.”

Gheriani pitches in at the courthouse, along with oil engineers and businessmen, many of them returned expatriates. Several floors above them, three of Gaddafi’s ill-fated mercenaries are locked up in what used to be a holding cell. Hollow-eyed and horrified, their futures seem bleak. “They are kept here for their own safety,” said Gheriani. “If we let them go the people would kill them,” he said, pointing at the milling crowd in the street below.

The erratic leader who recruited them, just over a week ago, on Thursday seemed to be at the verge of losing total control of the country. His grasp on sanity was again also in question. In a third address on state television, he blamed al-Qaida for inciting the rebellion and called on Libyans to rehabilitate wayward children who had joined the fray.

“The power is in your hands,” Gaddafi said. “It is a different system here [compared with Tunisia, or Egypt]. If you want change the advantage is with you. It is your choice. You can put people on trial, you can change your job.

“This is unacceptable, unbelievable. People claim that they are intelligent; teachers, engineers. If they are reasonable people with reasonable demands, just ask them what they want. But they are not reasonable. They have been dictated to by Bin Laden.”

Gaddafi did not appear on video, raising questions about where he is now as towns around the capital steadily fall into rebel hands. Zawya to the west of Tripoli was the scene of fighting between opposition groups and the regime that left scores dead, local officials said. In further bad news for Gaddafi, leading members of his own tribe have denounced him, and in particular the brutal crackdown he ordered on dissenters in the east of the country that led to Benghazi being lost.

“They started this protest peacefully,” said Gheriani. “And the youths joined them. And then when Gaddafi started killing them the people rose up.”

That version of Libya’s fast-moving revolution is echoed by most people spoken to by the Guardian over the past two days; a series of protests inspired by uprisings elsewhere in the region that were met by prescribed savagery.

That much seems formulaic in a regime that has shown no tolerance for dissent since 1969. However, the next phase was not in the script. “We all just decided we had had enough,” said Qais al-Ibrahim. “We felt that this was just too much and the people attacked the bases and the government. But to see things fall the way they did was astonishing.”

Another lawyer, Abdul Salam al-Masmari, said the savage over-reach of Gaddafi’s forces on Saturday was a final straw. “We started hearing about all the killings and we didn’t want to stay here demonstrating in front of the court. It was a chilling moment, a powerful moment. That’s when we knew we had to make this push for freedom.”

As the lawyer was speaking to us, security officers inside the court arrested a local reporter who they suspected was a spy for the remaining regime elements in Benghazi. He was taken to the same prison cell where the alleged mercenaries are held. The event left nerves even more frayed.

“The revolution is four days old,” said the female lawyer. “The fence of fear has been broken. But we still need to protect ourselves. The regime will find whatever way they can to reach us. He has all of our names and thoughts in a notebook and he has my voice on tape. He is not a real journalist. Collaborators are still out there. That’s why I don’t want to give you my name.”

Throughout the afternoon, there didn’t seem to be much strategic organising going on. But nor did there need to be. One by one, reports came in of towns falling like dominoes on the long march to Tripoli. The revolution seems to be self-fulfilling. Help keeps pouring in from unlikely sources.

“One of the regime’s key figures in the area came to see us today,” the female lawyer said. “He said he is with us now.”

Did she believe him?

“Not really,” she said. “But he has done his calculations and he can see that we are winning strongly. He will be loyal to where the strength is.”

On Libyan television the father of a defecting air force pilot wept with pride as he explained the exploits of his son, who had been sent to bomb three oilfields near Benghazi. The father’s account confirms those reported by workers at the Bregga oilfield of two men parachuting to earth and a jet fighter crashing nearby.

“My son was ordered to take off by a man with a gun pointing at his back. He said no and pulled the lever to eject them both. He is a hero. Even if he died I would still be proud. He refused to kill the people.”

Across town at the army base, which fell to swarming demonstrators on Sunday, a dungeon has been unearthed. It is not far from Gaddafi’s former parade ground, which lies in a crumpled heap. Today fathers were taking their children through the site, a heavily concreted underground hole that showed signs of recent use. “People were tortured here last week,” said one father. “It used to be the most feared place in town. Now it’s for everyone to see. It shows how bad he was and how lucky we are.”

Change has been rapidly embraced in Benghazi. In less than four days a new radio station has opened, called Freedom Radio, and a new newspaper has hit the streets. A revolutionary song recorded in recent days is on high rotation and bandanas in the colour of the former independence flag are worn.

However the rapid succession of events seems perhaps a little too fast for the revolution’s organisers. “I am really stressed about this,” said the female lawyer. “We are sleeping three hours a night, we are not seeing our families and we cannot get too far ahead of ourselves. One step at a time, we keep telling people. But they are really proud and enthusiastic. The trouble is this is not over yet. Tripoli is our capital, yesterday, today and tomorrow. That is our goal.”

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

These are the words of a young woman in Libya — a student , a blogger and a member of the youth protest movement in Libya that is part of a growing uprising against the tyrannical 41-year reign of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Speaking to the Guardian by phone from her home on the outskirts of Benghazi, the eastern city where the revolution in Libya began just six days ago, and where hundreds of protestors have been killed by Gaddafi’s security forces, she said, “I’ve seen violent movies and video games that are nothing compared to this. I can hear gunshots, helicopters circling overhead, then I hear the voices screaming. I can hear the screeching of four-by-fours in the street. No one has that type of car except his [Gaddafi's] people. My brother went to get bread, he’s not back; we don’t know if he’ll get back. The family is up all night every night, keeping watch, no one can sleep.”

Described by the Guardian as “an expert in subverting net censorship,” who “had regularly posted messages online to gather support” for the protests that began last week, the student explained how, since the uprising began, “her internet connection is down, landlines cut off, mobile coverage interrupted, electricity sporadically cut off and the house plunged into darkness.” She added, “There are even stories here that he [Gaddafi] has poisoned the water, so we dare not drink. If he could cut off the air that we breathe, he would.”

Unlike the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, where there was remarkably litle bloodshed, and the dictators Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak fell from power through the pressure of sheer numbers, there are no signs that Colonel Gaddafi has any intention of relinquishing power without a bloody fight. As the Guardian also reported, sources close to his family told the Saudi paper al-Sharq al-Awsat, “We will all die on Libyan soil,” and it appears that the brutal suppression of the uprising in Benghazi is being led by one of his sons, Khamis, described as “the Russian-trained commander of an elite special forces unit,” and that another of Gaddafi’s sons, Saadi, is also present, along with Abdullah al-Senussi, the regime’s long-standing head of military intelligence.

For those familiar with Libyan history, the brutal response to the uprising is typical, demonstrating what experts told the Guardian was Gaddafi’s “instinctive brutality when faced with challenges to his rule.” The London-based writer and activist Ashour Shamis explained, “For Gaddafi it’s kill or be killed. Now he’s gone straight for the kill.”

In the 1980s, as the Guardian explained, Gaddafi “sent hit squads to murder exiled ‘stray dogs’” who challenged his dictatorship, and throughout the 1990s he crushed Islamist opposition — and any other political opposition — at home, most notoriously instigating a massacre of at least a thousand prisoners in Abu Salim prison in Tripoli in June 1996, as I reported in an article in 2009, entitled, UK protestors mark 13th anniversary of Libyan prison massacre.

An adept survivor, Gaddafi came onside in the “War on Terror” after the 9/11 attacks, prompting the most miserably transparent examples of hypocrisy on the part of Western nations, as their leaders queued up to welcome the former pariah as an ally, and barely managed to disguise their excitement at having access to Libya’s rich oil reserves.

In ingratiating themselves with the dictator, both the US and the UK willingly abandoned former opponents of the regime, who had, until then, been regarded as victims of oppression. The US willingly rounded up exiled Libyans in Afghanistan and Pakistan, sending them to Guantanamo and labeling them as “enemy combatants.” Two of these men eventually accepted voluntary repatriation from Guantanamo, but both were imprisoned on their return, and only one of the two, Abu Sufian Hamouda (transferred in October 2007), has been released, while the other, Muhammad al-Rimi (transferred in December 2006), is still held in Abu Salim.

Both of these men are, however, more fortunate than Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan, who was rendered by the CIA to Egypt after his capture in Afghanistan in December 2001, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that two al-Qaeda operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. Although al-Libi recanted his tortured lie, it was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and after al-Libi had been moved around various other secret prisons, he was returned to Libya, where he conveniently died, reportedly by committing suicide, in May 2009, just three days before the US reopened its embassy in Tripoli.

In the UK, meanwhile, Libyan asylum seekers, who had found themselves welcomed as refugees from the terrorist-supporting dictator Gaddafi, suddenly discovered that they had been designated as “terror suspects,” and were imprisoned without charge or trial pending deportation.

When judges went off-script, refusing to allow the government to return any of these men, and ruling that the “diplomatic assurances” agreed between Gaddafi and the UK government, which purported to guarantee that they would be treated humanely, were worthless, the men were then held on control orders, an oppressive form of house arrest that, like the deportation regime, involved them being held without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence.

After the Law Lords — following the lead of the European Court of Human Rights — ruled in June 2009 that the control order regime breaches Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial, the Libyans had their control orders dropped, either because the disclosure of any information would have demonstrated that they were pawns in a deeply cynical game, or because their liberty was now useful to Gaddafi, who, at the time, was brokering a deal with former political opponents, whereby they would left unmolested if they renounced violence.

As the unrest in Libya spreads to the capital, Tripoli, the Gaddafi regime continues to respond with brute force, using planes to fire on protestors. Whether they can prevail against a people who are overcoming their fear in vast numbers and are apparently prepared to die in an attempt to secure their freedom remains to be seen, but the regime is clearly under threat. Last night, another of Gaddafi’s sons, Saif al-Islam, the supposed moderate and reformer of the family, embraced by Western hypocrites as a sign of the way forward, was wheeled out to deliver an incoherent speech on TV that was full of threats, hyperbole and lies.

Although he conceded that it was a “tragedy” that Libyans had died and stated, “There were some planning errors,” including “Errors from the police … and the army that was not equipped and prepared to confront angry people and … to defend its premises, weapons and ammunition,” he also warned apocalyptically of “civil war” unless order was restored, telling the TV audience that his father was still in the country and that the regime had the fiull support of the army. “We will fight to the last minute, until the last bullet,” he said.

He also claimed, “There is a plot against Libya,” blamed “an Islamic group with a military agenda” for the bloodshed in Benghazi — despite there being no evidence of Islamist involvement in a movement spearheaded by young people, trade unions and lawyers — and said Libya “would see ‘rivers of blood,’ an exodus of foreign oil companies and occupation by ‘imperialists’ if the violence continued.”

At the time of writing, al-Jazeera was reporting that “At least 61 people were killed in clashes in Tripoli,” but that “The protests appeared to be gathering momentum, with demonstrators saying they had taken control of several key towns in the country,” including Benghazi. Ahmad Jibreel, a Libyan diplomat, who confirmed rumors that the justice minister Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al-Jeleil had resigned because he “sided with the protesters,” also told al-Jazeera that “key cities near Libya’s border with Egypt were now in the hands of protesters, which he said would enable foreign media to now enter the country.”

Summing up the spirit of resistance, he said:

Gaddafi’s guards started shooting people in the second day and they shot two people only. We had on that day in Al Bayda city only 300 protesters. When they killed two people, we had more than 5,000 at their funeral, and when they killed 15 people the next day, we had more than 50,000 the following day. This means that the more Gaddafi kills people, the more people go into the streets.

Echoing this spirit, I have just received a message from an exiled Libyan friend, who told me:

Finally and maybe we will be free at last! I am having sleepless nights filled with euphoria about what’s happening in Libya. I am so sick of being in exile and not being able to contribute to my country’s development. Am sick of being ashamed of it and what Gaddafi made of it.

As the situation continues to develop, those words mean much more to me than the platitudes of government representatives in the US and the UK, who have done so little to oppose Gaddafi’s rule, and so much to enrich themselves, and who, in addition, have almost excelled in cynicism when it comes to Libya’s role in the “War on Terror.” As my friend also told me:

All I can say is that we are all so excited about the prospects of change and the ability to have some say in how to manage our wealth of natural resources. The West robbed us of this right earlier, then we allowed our own dreadful leaders do the same and worse.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Although the release of the 37 men was obviously timed to shift attention from protests marking the anniversary by the regime’s many opponents — including family members of those whose deaths or disappearances have never been acknowledged — it is, nevertheless, a sign of progress, as well as political opportunism.

Under the influence of Saif al-Islam, one of Gaddafi’s sons and the head of the Gaddafi Foundation, a charity that includes a human rights committee, the Libyan regime has, in recent years, sought to reconcile itself with former political opponents, leading to the release of hundreds of prisoners since 2007. As Reuters explained, “Saif al-Islam has campaigned for reconciliation with Islamists who promise to lay down their arms. His initiative has met resistance from conservatives in his father’s entourage with whom he is competing for influence.”

According to official Libyan figures, 705 prisoners have been released as part of the initiative. Tuesday’s release followed the release of 214 men in March, and on Tuesday Mohamed al-Allagi, the chairman of the human rights committee of the Gaddafi Foundation, stated, “These releases come in the context of national reconciliation and social peace,” adding, as AFP reported, that ”these people had completed their rehabilitation program, which was aimed at getting the prisoners to renounce violence and reintegrate them into Libyan society.” Although over 300 prisoners “accused of having ties to Islamist militant groups” are still imprisoned, al-Allagi also explained that the foundation was “working to free the other detainees so that there will no longer be any prisoners of opinion in Libya.”

As Reuters explained, five of the prisoners released on Tuesday had links to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), according to Abdelhakim Belhadj, a former leader of the group who was freed in March. Formed by former Libyan mujahideen who had traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Union, the LIFG was formed in 1995, and dedicated to the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. In 2007, as AFP explained, “Al-Qaeda announced that the LIFG had joined the jihadist network and Abu Laith al-Libi, one of bin Laden’s top lieutenants, was thought to be directing it for a time from Central Asia. Libi was killed in a 2008 US missile strike in the tribal zone of northwest Pakistan and last year, the Gaddafi Foundation announced that Islamists being held in Libyan prisons that had previously had links with Al-Qaeda had renounced those ties.”

Belhadj, one of three significant LIFG figures released in March, along with “military chief” Khaled Sharif and “ideological official” Sami Saadi (as AFP described them) also said that the rest of the prisoners released on Tuesday had been detained “because they sympathized with Islamist militant movements, but were not LIFG members.”

The release of ex-Guantánamo prisoner Abu Sufian Hamouda

They included a former Guantánamo prisoner transferred to Libyan custody nearly three years ago, in October 2007, named by AFP as Abu Sofian Ben Guemou, and by Reuters as Sofiane Ibrahim Gammu. Reuters noted that media reports had “quoted an official in the Gaddafi Foundation as saying Gammu was a former driver for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden,” but as he left the prison on Tuesday, he stated, “I am not bin Laden’s driver. It’s a misunderstanding.”

This was almost certainly true. Identified in Guantánamo as Abu Sufian Hamouda or Abu Sufian bin Qumu, his story, as revealed in publicly available documents, suggests that the bin Laden connection was only relevant in relation to a job that he took in Sudan for a company owned by bin Laden, when the al-Qaeda leader was involved in construction work and other activities unrelated to terrorism between 1992 and 1996, prior to his expulsion from Sudan and his return to Afghanistan.

As Hamouda explained in Guantánamo (and as I reported at the time of his transfer to Libyan custody):

[H]e had served in the Libyan army as a tank driver from 1979 to 1990, but was “arrested and jailed on multiple occasions for drug and alcohol offenses.” Having apparently escaped from prison in 1992, he fled to Sudan, where he worked as a truck driver. In an attempt to beef up the evidence against him, the Department of Defense alleged that the company he worked for, the Wadi al-Aqiq company, was “owned by Osama bin Laden,” and also attempted to claim that he joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group … even while admitting that an unidentified “al-Qaeda/LIFG facilitator” had described him as “a noncommittal LIFG member who received no training.”

After relocating to Pakistan, [he] apparently stayed there until the summer of 2001, when he and a friend crossed the border into Afghanistan, traveling to Jalalabad and then to Kabul, where [he] found a job working as an accountant for Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, the director of al-Wafa, a Saudi charity which provided humanitarian aid to Afghans, but which was regarded by the US authorities as a front for al-Qaeda.

In the years since Hamouda’s transfer to Libyan custody, everyone connected to al-Wafa, including Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, has been released, but in any case, as I also explained at the time:

[His] involvement with the organization centered on its humanitarian work … In the “evidence” presented for his Combatant Status Review Tribunal — under factors purporting to demonstrate that he “supported military operations against the United States or its coalition partners” — it was stated that, while working for al-Wafa, he traveled to Kunduz “to oversee the distribution of rice that was being guarded by four to five armed guards.” In Guantánamo, it seems, even the distribution of rice can be regarded as a component in a military operation.

I also explained:

Captured in Islamabad, after fleeing from Afghanistan following the US-led invasion, [he] was held for a month by the Pakistani authorities, and was then handed over to the Americans, who began mining him for the flimsy “evidence” of terrorist activities outlined above. Earlier this year [2007], he was cleared for release, and, despite misgivings on the part of his lawyers, stated that he was prepared to return to Libya, even though what awaits him may not be any better than what he was suffered over the last five years. Perhaps, as one of Guantánamo’s truly lost men, he has decided that, if he is to spend the rest of his life in prison for no apparent reason, he would rather be in Libya, where his wife and his family might be able to see him, than in Guantánamo, where, like every other detainee, he was more isolated from his relatives than even the deadliest convicted mass murderer on the US mainland.

In September 2008, Human Rights Watch stated in a report that, according to the US State Department, officials had visited Hamouda in December 2007, and that, although the Libyan security forces “were holding him on unknown charges and apparently without access to a lawyer … he did not complain of maltreatment [and] was scheduled to receive a family visit” at the end of the month. The Gaddafi Foundation subsequently claimed that he had indeed been “granted a family visit,” and added that the foundation was providing an apartment for his family in Tripoli.

As a result, Hamouda may indeed be regarded as fortunate, given that, two years after the Human Rights Watch report, he has eventually been released, and also because so many of the men held with him in Guantánamo are still there, are still totally isolated from their families, and have no notion of when, if ever, they will be released. However, it should also be noted that being returned to Libya from Guantánamo — or from any of the secret prisons operated by the Bush administration — is no guarantee that prisoners will finally be released after three years in Abu Salim prison.

Not released: Muhammad al-Rimi, transferred from Guantánamo to Libyan custody in December 2006

In December 2006, Muhammad al-Rimi (also identified as Muhammad al-Futuri or Abdesalam Safrani), a 40-year old who had been held at Guantánamo for four years, also voluntarily accepted repatriation. Accused of being a member of the LIFG, al-Rimi had denied the charges (and had been approved for release from Guantánamo by a US military review board), although he did tell the authorities, “I have a problem with the Libyan government and it is a long story.”

According to the Human Rights Watch report in September 2008, the Gaddafi Foundation stated that al-Rimi was treated for tuberculosis upon his return. An official also said that he would “go back to his family soon,” but by all accounts he is still held in Abu Salim prison, three years and eight months after his return. The US State Department told Human Rights Watch in January 2008 that US officials visited al-Rimi in August and December 2007 and stated that “Libyan security forces were detaining him but were treating him well.” Human Rights Watch also noted that, at the meeting in December 2007, which took place in the presence of Libyan officials and an official from the Gaddafi Foundation, al-Rimi was not informed of the charges against him, and apparently explained that he “had not seen a lawyer since his return” and “had received no family visits.”

Reasons to be wary: the death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

Moreover, al-Rimi is not the only returnee from US custody who might be tempted to regard Abu Sufian Hamouda as fortunate. The most horrendous recent story is that of Ali Mohamed Abdelaziz al-Fakheri, more commonly known as Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a former CIA “ghost prisoner,” who, notoriously, was sent to Egypt by the CIA after his capture on the Pakistani border in December 2001, where, under torture, he made a false confession about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, regarding the use of chemical weapons, that was used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Al-Libi was subsequently held in a variety of secret prisons in a number of different countries, either directly run by the CIA (in Afghanistan) or on behalf of the CIA (in countries including Jordan and Morocco), but was finally returned to Libya in 2006, where, last May, he reportedly died in Abu Salim prison by committing suicide, even though most observers concluded that this was highly unlikely — and also noted that, with suspicious timing, the US embassy in Tripoli reopened just three days after his death.

Al-Libi’s death, in such dubious circumstances, reinforces the warnings contained in recent reports by Amnesty International (PDF, June 2010) and Human Rights Watch (December 2009) that, although improvements have been made in recent years, “The human rights situation in Libya remains dire” (as Amnesty International described it), and Libya’s human rights record “remains poor, despite some limited progress in recent years,” as Human Rights Watch explained.

Other Libyans held in secret CIA prisons

For cases involving the United States, al-Libi’s remains the bleakest of benchmarks for suspicion of all the parties involved, but questions also remain about the fate of a number of other men repatriated after being held in secret CIA prisons. As the UN explained in a major report on secret detention earlier this year, four other Libyans (along with al-Libi) were returned to Libya in 2005 or 2006. The four men were:

Hassan Raba’i and Khaled al-Sharif, both captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2003, who had “spent time in a CIA prison in Afghanistan”; Abdallah al-Sadeq, seized in a covert CIA operation in Thailand in the spring of 2004; and Abu Munder al-Saadi, both held briefly before being rendered to [Libya]. In May 2009, Human Rights Watch reported that its representatives briefly met Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi on a visit to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, although he refused to be interviewed. Human Rights Watch interviewed four other men, who claimed that, “before they were sent to [Libya], United States forces had tortured them in detention centers in Afghanistan, and supervised their torture in Pakistan and Thailand.” One of the four was Hassan Raba’i, also known as Mohamed Ahmad Mohamed al-Shoroeiya, who stated that, in mid-2003, in a place he believed was Bagram prison in Afghanistan, “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.”

In a visit to Abu Salim prison in May 2009 (the details of which were not reported until June 2010), representatives of Amnesty International confirmed that the four men discussed above were held, and also that two other men previously held in secret CIA prisons — al-Mahdi Jawda, aka Ayoub al-Libi, and Majid Abu Yasser, aka Adnan al-Libi — were also held. These were important revelations, as the whereabouts of both men were previously unknown, and they provide a few more crucial details for the handful of researchers — myself included — who continue to regard the fate of the 94 prisoners held in secret prisons, and the unknown number rendered to prisons in other countries, as an outstanding crime of the Bush administration that needs exposing, and that President Obama has lamentably failed to address.

Noticeably, three of these men were released in March this year, as AFP mentioned: in their report, Khaled Sharif is Khaled al-Sharif, Sami Saadi is Abu Munder al-Saadi (also identified as Sami Mustafa al-Saadi) and Abdelhakim Belhadj is Abdallah al-Sadeq. Their release apparently brings to an end their long, extra-legal detention as a result of cooperation between the US and Libyan authorities, although it is of concern that the other three are still held, and as the Amnesty report pointed out, “To the best of Amnesty International’s knowledge, before they were released Abdelhakim Belhadj was sentenced to death and Khaled al-Sharif aka Abu Hazem was facing trial proceedings for terrorism-related offences” that could also lead to a death penalty being imposed. Although these sentences have now been suspended, their imposition obviously means that a great weight still hangs over both men.

During visits by Amnesty representatives in 2009 and 2010, only one of these men, Khaled al-Sharif, agreed to speak to them, and his descriptions of his treatment are worth repeating, if only to emphasize how a full accounting for the Bush administration’s program of rendition and detention in secret prisons remains of the utmost importance. As Amnesty described al-Sharif’s testimony:

He described his arrest by US and Pakistani forces in Peshawar on 3 April 2002 along with Mohamed Shu’iya, known as Hassan Ruba’i, and his detention in various facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan — in Peshawar, Islamabad, Kabul and Bagram. He recounted being tortured in a detention facility in Peshawar, where he spent a week, by Pakistani officials who beat him with a leather belt and stepped on his injured foot, while being questioned by an American man. He also said that he was tortured while detained in Kabul for about a year [perhaps in the CIA’s “Salt Pit” prison], including by having icy water poured on him and being punched in the stomach. He also described being attached to the ceiling and left suspended for days and being handcuffed to an iron bar in an uncomfortable position for months — the handcuffs were only removed for 15 minutes during meals, either once or twice a day. He was not allowed to shower during the time spent attached to the iron bar. He said that in Kabul, he was interrogated and tortured by US officers. After about a year, he was transferred to Bagram in Afghanistan, where he spent another year before being taken to a US airbase and flown to Libya with Mahdi Jawda, aka Ayoub al-Libi in April 2005.

What this means for the future

The lesson from all this — beyond the hope that calls will be made for President Obama to reveal the names of all those held in Bush’s secret program, and what happened to them — is that, although Saif al-Islam and the Gaddafi Foundation are to be cautiously congratulated for their reforms, the release of the 37 men on Tuesday — and of Abu Sufian Hamouda in particular — cannot be regarded as providing the Obama administration with a viable rationale for repatriating any of the four remaining Libyans in Guantánamo, unless they are clear about what awaits them.

This year, two Libyans who feared repatriation were given new homes — one, Abdul Ra’ouf al-Qassim, who had been fighting against enforced repatriation since 2007, was sent to Albania in February, and Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi was sent to Georgia in March. As I have recently heard uncomfortable rumors that the US authorities are sounding out the possibility of repatriating other Libyans from Guantánamo, the lesson of Abu Sufian Hamouda and Muhammad al-Rimi should not be forgotten — unless, of course, the men in question have concluded, as Hamouda and al-Rimi did under George W. Bush, that anything is better than remaining in Guantánamo with less chance of being released under Barack Obama than existed under his predecessor.

And that, sadly, is a very real possibility.

Note: For a good report on the release of the former LIFG leaders in March this year, see this CNN article.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.