Whenever the subject of torture comes up, the White House responds reflexively with a simple, categorical statement: “We don’t torture.” Occasionally, the president and his team will go even further in their denials, adding statements such as, “We do not render to countries that torture. That has been our policy, and that policy will remain the same.”
That second part, of course, refers to a tactic called “extraordinary rendition,” in which the U.S. turns over suspects to other countries to be tortured. It’s like the outsourcing of war crimes.
We’ve known about rendition for several years, but ABC News has uncovered what it calls the “smoking gun” on the administration’s program. The reports details CIA cables that document the rendering of terrorist suspect Ibn al Sheikh al Libi to Egypt to be tortured.
[CIA’s “debriefers” talked to al Libi after his return from Cairo typed out] a series of operational cables to be sent Feb. 4 and Feb. 5 to the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va. In the view of some insiders, these cables provide the “smoking gun” on the whole rendition program — a convincing account of how the rendition program was, they say, illegally sending prisoners into the hands of torturers. […]
A Feb. 5 cable records that al Libi was told by a “foreign government service” (Egypt) that: “the next topic was al-Qa’ida’s connections with Iraq…This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story.”
Al Libi indicated that his interrogators did not like his responses and then “placed him in a small box approximately 50cm X 50cm [20 inches x 20 inches].” He claimed he was held in the box for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, al Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to “tell the truth.” When al Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al Libi claimed that “he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back.” Al Libi told CIA debriefers that he then “was punched for 15 minutes.”
Eventually, Al Libi said what his interrogators wanted to hear, even though it was false. And wouldn’t you know it, the torture-induced lies ended up in Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N.
Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons. This evidence was used by Colin Powell at the United Nations a year earlier (February 2003) to justify the war in Iraq. (“I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al Qaeda,” Powell said. “Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.”)
Except, of course, his story was bogus, and the result of torture and rendition.
Here was a cable then that informed Washington that one of the key pieces of evidence for the Iraq war — the al Qaeda/Iraq link — was not only false but extracted by effectively burying a prisoner alive.
Although there have been claims about torture inflicted on those rendered by the CIA to countries like Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Uzbekistan, this is the first clear example of such torture detailed in an official government document.
Bring on the special prosecutor.