WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About Torture/Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (Andy Worthington)

[kpete]

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

18.6.09

Ibn al-Shaykh al-LibiIn a world exclusive, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, reveals new information, from a source in Libya, about Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the former US “ghost prisoner” who died in a Libyan jail last month, focusing, in particular, on the prisons in which he was held, and the ways in which torture was used by his interrogators.

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The death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

There were several signs to indicate that the story of al-Libi’s death was suspicious. Oea is owned by one of Colonel Gaddafi’s sons, and, as Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of the Gaddafi regime, explained to Newsweek, “This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya.” He added that, throughout Gaddafi’s 40-year rule, there had been several instances in which political prisoners were reported to have committed suicide, but that “then the families get the bodies back and discover the prisoners had been shot in the back or tortured to death.”

New revelations about al-Libi’s torture

Following al-Libi’s death, disturbing details of his detention in at least seven different locations around the world have emerged in statements made by a source inside Libya. This source, who wishes to remain anonymous for his own safety and for the safety of his family, has stated that he met al-Libi at the prison before his death, and that al-Libi explained to him what had happened to him in the four years and three months between his capture and his rendition to Libya in the spring of 2006.

The story that al-Libi told to this source in Abu Salim prison was related to me by former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who was just a teenager when he arrived in the UK in the 1980s from Libya, where his father, a lawyer and trade union activist, had been murdered by the Gaddafi regime. I cannot, of course, verify the details of the story Deghayes told me via the source in Libya, as al-Libi’s death brought to an end any possibility that he would one day be able to explain what happened to him at the hands of US forces, the Libyan authorities and others involved in his rendition and torture, but so many of the details correspond with facts that have already been established through other research, that it seems certain to me that the story is true.

According to Deghayes, the Libyan source explained that al-Libi told him that, after his capture, when he was held briefly in Afghanistan (in the US prison at Kandahar airport, and on the USS Bataan, according to a previous report – PDF), he was rendered to Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco and Jordan, and was then rendered back to Afghanistan, where he was held in three separate prisons run by, or under the control of the CIA. He also explained that he was subjected to torture in all these locations, and provided disturbing details of how he was manipulated by his interrogators.

EXCERPTS:

I was being interrogated all the time, in the evening and in the day. I was shown thousands of photos, and I really mean thousands, I am not exaggerating … And in between all this you have the torture, the abuse, the cursing, humiliation. They had threatened me with being sexually abused and electrocuted. I was told that if I wanted to leave with permanent disability both mental and physical, that that could be arranged. They said they had all the facilities of Jordan to achieve that. I was told that I had to talk, I had to tell them everything.

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They tortured me a great deal in order to make me confess to them about the American targets that al-Qaeda was planning to hit, even though I had no knowledge about that. They even forced me, through torture, to make up fictitious targets, about which they could report to the Americans. Their masters would later discover that these were empty threats, and that such targets were made up under torture.

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more:
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/06/18/world-exclusive-new-revelations-about-the-torture-of-ibn-al-shaykh-al-libi/

[Blackhatjack]

1. And how should this have made America Safer from terrorists' attacks?

Just another instance in which torture is proven to produce false information that can be exploited for political gain.

Thanks a lot Bush/Cheney etc.