The Missing Terrorist
The Bush administration once proudly trumpeted its capture of terrorist
leader Ibn al-Shakyh al-Libi—a key source for the assertion that Iraq helped
train Al Qaeda in biochem weapons. His story has since been discredited.
Where is he now?
Web exclusive
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
Updated: 3:22 p.m. ET May 29, 2007
May 29, 2007 - A group of House members is pressing the White House to
provide answers for the first time to one of the biggest mysteries of the
debate over pre-Iraq War intelligence: what really happened to captured
terrorist leader Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi—once considered one of the U.S.
military’s most prized catches in the war on terror?
Al-Libi, who ran one of Al Qaeda’s biggest training camps, was the principle
source for former secretary of State Colin Powell’s claim to the U.N.
Security Council that Saddam Hussein’s regime had helped train Al Qaeda in
chemical and biological weapons. But as first reported by NEWSWEEK three
years ago, al-Libi later recanted his story about Iraqi weapons training,
forcing the CIA to withdraw all its reporting based on his assertions.
A newly updated edition of the book, “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin,
Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War”—co-written by the author of this
article and David Corn and published this week in paperback—quotes from
declassified CIA operational cables that suggest that al-Libi had been
brutally tortured by the Egyptian intelligence service and coerced into
making his claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction training for Al
Qaeda.
The cables indicate that al-Libi told agency debriefers in February 2004
that he “fabricated” his story about the weapons training only after his
Egyptian interrogators crammed him into a tiny box for 17 hours. His account
appears to be the first public description of a controversial “aggressive”
interrogation technique called a “mock burial,” in which interrogators make
their subjects believe they are being buried alive in a bid to elicit
information.
In a May 24 letter to President Bush, the House members pushed for answers.
“We are deeply concerned that an important facet of your administration’s
case that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States, which has
been demonstrated as false, rested upon information extracted through
torture by a foreign intelligence service,” wrote Democratic Reps. Ed Markey
and William Delahunt of Massachusetts and Jerrold Nadler of New York. Markey
is sponsor of a bill to halt the CIA’s practice of “rendering” suspects to
foreign countries for interrogation; Delahunt is chairman of a House Foreign
Affairs Oversight subcommittee that is investigating the rendition issue.
Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said today
that the White House had just received the letter and will review it.
“Prewar intelligence has already been exhaustively reviewed by the Congress,
as well as an independent commission, that led to a restructuring of the
intelligence community,” he added.
The three House members, noting that it is a violation of U.S. and
international law to transfer anyone to a country where there are
“substantial grounds” to believe the person might be tortured, asked Bush
whether CIA personnel participated in the interrogation of al-Libi. They
also asked whether the administration ever took any steps to determine if
the torture allegations were in fact true. (While declining to discuss any
specifics about al-Libi’s case, a CIA spokesman said that as a general
matter,”the CIA does not conduct or condone torture, and does not transport
individuals to other countries for the purpose of torture.”)
The House members also want Bush to provide Congress with information about
al-Libi’s current whereabouts—a prime subject of interest to human-rights
groups and others who suspect that the administration is concealing key
information about him because of the potential political and legal
ramifications. “Where is al-Libi today?” the letter asks.
Other captured Al Qaeda operatives have claimed to be torture victims. But
few accounts have been as detailed—and hold the potential for more
embarrassment—than the one provided by al-Libi. When al-Libi was first
captured in January 2002, Pentagon officials described him as the “emir” of
the notorious Khalden paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan; White House
officials indicated at the time that al-Libi was on their list of “top 12”
suspected Al Qaeda leaders targeted for apprehension.
But administration references to al-Libi all but vanished after the NEWSWEEK
disclosure in 2004 about his pivotal role in the shaping of intelligence on
purported Iraq-Al Qaeda ties in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. As later
findings by the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed, the account
extracted from al-Libi was used by President Bush as the prime basis for a
key assertion in his Oct. 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati about the threat
posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime. “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al
Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases,” Bush said in the
speech, just days before Congress voted on the White House-requested
resolution authorizing the president to go to war against Iraq.
Missing Terrorist
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