Who Killed Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi?

Posted by Scott MacLeod Sunday, May 24, 2009 at 10:02 am

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Nothing better illustrates the farce of the Bush administration's involvements in the Middle East than the brutal detention and mysterious death of Ali al-Fakhiri, better known in the media by his nom de guerre, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi.

In making the case to the American people and a skeptical world for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Bush and his officials put enormous stock in a claim made by al-Libi. He had been arrested by Pakistani police in November 2001 and handed over to U.S. military authorities, who regarded him as the highest-ranking al-Qaeda operative to be captured since 9/11.

Al-Libi told interrogators that al-Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq—thus providing the Bush administration with the vital justification to attack Iraq in response to 9/11. In his powerfully persuasive address to the U.N. a month before the invasion, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to al-Libi's evidence to prove the supposedly “sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda network.”

A lie, it turned out. A lie spoken as the result of torture, telling the Bush administration what it wanted to hear, a lie that was then used to peddle a war.

After being turned over by the Pakistanis, al-Libi was apparently initially held at a U.S. detention facility at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. In his eight-year odyssey as a prisoner, al-Libi then reportedly moved on to the amphibious ship USS Bataan, to a secret location in Egypt, to Guantanamo Bay and eventually to Abu Salim prison in his native Libya—a Libya, by the way, that is ruled by an Arab autocrat who suddenly decided to become a U.S. ally in Bush's “war on terrorism” after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

While in Egypt in early 2002, according to a declassified cable cited by Human Rights Watch, the Egyptian interrogators demanded information from al-Libi about al-Qaeda's connections with Iraq but that he had difficulty even coming up with a story. HRW cites a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report saying that al-Libi “lied to avoid torture.”

According to Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, al-Libi was subjected to the technique known as water boarding while in Egypt. In a piece written for the Washington Note, Wilkerson recalls that when the Bush administration authorized harsh interrogation methods for al-Qaeda detainees in early 2002, its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack—as former Vice President Cheney continues to insist—but “discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda.” When the interrogation team reported to Cheney's office that al-Libi had been compliant, Wilkerson asserts, “the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods.” During the water boarding, he says, al-Libi “revealed” the al-Qaeda-Iraq relationship in order to get the torture to stop.

Wilkerson doesn't say so, but it's even worse than that. In February 2002, a U.S. intelligence report specifically warned the Bush administration against using al-Libi's confession as the foundation for its case of a Saddam connection to 9/11. Among the Defense Intelligence Agency's concerns was that al-Libi lacked specifics about the Iraqis involved with al-Qaeda and where Iraqi-sponsored training for al-Qaeda terrorists had taken place. He recanted his story in January 2004, throwing into question everything al-Libi—at one point the highest ranking al-Qaeda leader in U.S. custody—had ever said.

The case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi is at the center of one of the most controversial wars in American history, a war based on claims that Saddam possessed WMD and was working with al-Qaeda that turned out to be lies, a war that diverted resources from fighting the real perpetrators of 9/11. Whether it was the mangling of U.S. priorities in the Middle East, or the reckless baying for Saddam's blood, or the fabrication and misuse of intelligence, or torture and denial of basic rights to prisoners—al-Libi's case has it all.

The chance to ever learn al-Libi's full story ended on May 11 when a Libyan newspaper reported that he had committed “suicide” inside Abu Salim prison. Curiously, al-Libi managed to steel himself through years of incarceration and torture, only to supposedly commit “suicide” as a new U.S. government opens the Bush administration's torture files. Wilkerson says that his death came as U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get Col. Gadhafi's government to allow al-Libi to be interviewed. As it turns out, Human Rights Watch was in fact allowed brief access to al-Libi last April 27, two weeks or less before his “suicide.” He refused to speak to the HRW representative, except to ask, “Where were you when I was being tortured in American jails?”

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo