Sunday, May 17, 2009

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

There has not been much coverage about the death of this man in a Libyan prison. Al-Shaykh was one of our many ghost prisoners. We used this particular man to try to get evidence of a link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam... when we finished torturing him we turned him over to the Libyans who in-turn disappeared him into their prison system. Finally on April 27th human rights watch was allowed to meet with him and a few others. He had nothing to say to them except something along the lines of "where were you when I was being tortured?" Now he is dead...the Libyan's say he committed suicide but we will probably never know if that is the truth. What we do know is that his death came at a convenient time... a time when it has first started to surface that we were using torture to try to get some of these men to provide a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam....since there was no link, torture was the only way to get people to say that there was a connection.
Andy Worthington has more.