On Sunday, former Vice President Dick Cheney made an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation to make his case on the benefits of torture. The same day, news broke that a former high-value CIA detainee who provided bogus information cited by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war had died in a Libyan prison. Until last month, there have been questions surrounding the whereabouts of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. We now know he is dead.
Al-Libi was an integral player in the torture debate. Here's Peter Finn’s of the role the al-Libi interrogation played in efforts to make a case for war against Iraq:
Libi was captured fleeing Afghanistan in late 2001, and he vanished into the secret detention system run by the Bush Administration. He became the unnamed source, according to Senate investigators, behind Bush Administration claims in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to al-Qaeda operatives. The claim was most famously delivered by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his address to the United Nations in February 2003. Powell later called the speech a “blot” on his record, saying he was not given all available intelligence and analysis within the government. The Defense Intelligence Agency and some analysts at the CIA had questioned the veracity of Libi’s testimony, which was obtained after the prisoner was transferred to Egyptian custody for questioning by the CIA, according to Senate investigators.
In their book “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,” Michael Isikoff and David Corn said Libi made up the story about Iraqi training after he was beaten and subjected to a “mock burial” by his Egyptian interrogators, who put him in a cramped box for 17 hours. Libi recanted the story after being returned to CIA custody in 2004.
In 2002, two months after the CIA authored a report warning that al-Libi had provided bad information, President Bush gave a speech in Cincinnati and said that "we’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases." He was referring to information gained from the torture of al-Libi. Were al-Libi still alive today, he could be a star witness in a war crimes investigation. Scott Horton has more:
When, in September 2006, President Bush ordered the transfer of the “worst of the worst” terrorist detainees from CIA black sites to Guantánamo, al-Libi was nowhere to be found. Why? Al-Libi had great potential to embarrass the CIA and the Bush White House. The Bush Administration wanted him out of sight. They accomplished that, in the first instance, by turning him over to Libyan authorities, who subjected him to a pseudo-trial and locked him away for what turned out to be a life sentence...
He was the Bush era’s most inconvenient witness. And now he’s dead.
