Smoking gun: The convenient death of Ibn al-sheikh al-Libi

The English language edition of the Libyan newspaper Ennahar reported on May 10, 2009, that Ibn al-sheikh al-Libi, a high ranking Al Qaeda operative, was found dead in his Libyan jail cell. Libyan prison authorities claim that his death was suicide. The Libyan government, however, has not confirmed the death, and the Libyan Embassy in Washington said it had no information. The CIA has also declined to comment. Yet the death of Al-Libi is extremely suspect. It raises the immediate and compelling question of whether, driven by human desperation, he actually took his own life or whether he was murdered for very covert political reasons. Given that committing suicide in a prison cell, though not impossible, is problematical, and that further, Al Libi was a former imam and a devout Muslim for whom suicide would have been a grievous sin, and that moreover, his friends are said to doubt his suicide, murder becomes the most likely cause of his death. Yet, the final compelling question is who was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, and why would someone want him dead? 

The background available on him states that al-Libi, whose real name was Ali Mohamed Al-Fakheri, was 46 years old and had led the Al Khaldan training camp (one of more than a hundred such Al Qaeda camps) in Afghanistan. This camp just so happened to be the one where several notable Al-Qaeda figures, including three of the 9-11 hijackers, had trained. Al-Libi was also an associate of Abu Zubaydah (regarded as second in command of Al Qaeda) and had been placed on the September 26, 2002 list of terrorists released by the U.S. government following September 11th, at which time any personal assets he may have had were frozen. 

He was captured by Pakistani officials at the end of 2001 or beginning of 2002, along with hundreds of other Al Qaeda suspects, as he attempted to flee Afghanistan following the ensuing collapse of the Taliban during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter, he vanished into the secret detention system run by the Bush administration. He was perhaps the most famous of the “disappeared” U.S. prisoners seized in the “War on Terror,” who were “extraordinarily rendered” to the custody of governments in third countries where, it was presumed, they would never be seen or heard from again. In his case, he had been secretly transferred by the Bush administration to a prison in Libya after having been held by the CIA both in secret “black hole prisons”, probably in Afghanistan, and later in Egypt. It was during this detainment that he was tortured using the “enhanced interrogation methods” ordered by the Bush administration, and it is at this juncture in which al-Libi becomes a major historical figure.

Waterboarding and mock burial methods were used to "tune him up" and with a few skilled touches he produced a very sweet sound to his captors’ ears, singing just the song that they wanted to hear. In exchange for an end to the torture, he agreed to tell them whatever they wanted to know, and what this bird sang is now part of the central history of our times: Al-Libi has been identified as the primary source of faulty prewar intelligence regarding chemical weapons training between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it was this confession drawn forth from counter-productive interrogation methods that was used by the Bush Administration as one of its main justifications for the invasion of Iraq. 

But it was all a lie. On February 5, 2003, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, utilizing this lie that came straight from Al-Libi, claimed in his notorious speech to the UN Security Council, “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to Al Qaeda,” In Cincinnati in October 2002, Bush informed the public: "Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases”. It was, of course, all a smoke screen that the Bush administration used to cover its real reasons for its invasion of Iraq; oil and neo-conservative New World Order aims. Further, Powell's speech came less than a month after a then-classified CIA report had concluded that the information provided by al-Libi was unreliable and about a year after a Defense Intelligence Agency report concluded the same thing. The DIA concluded in February 2002 that Al Libi deliberately misled interrogators.

In September of 2006, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released "Phase II" of its report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. Conclusion 3 of the report states the following: 

Postwar findings support the CIA February 2002 assessment that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was likely intentionally misleading his debriefers when he said that Iraq provided two al-Qa'ida associates with chemical and biological weapons (CBW) training in 2000… Postwar findings do not support the CIA's assessment that his reporting was credible… No postwar information has been found that indicates CBW training occurred and the detainee who provided the key prewar reporting about this training recanted his claims after the war… CIA's January 2003 version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism described al-Libi's reporting for CBW training "credible", but noted that the individuals who traveled to Iraq for CBW training had not returned, so al-Libi was not in position to know if the training had taken place… In January 2004, al-Libi recanted his allegations about CBW training and many of his other claims about Iraq's links to al Qa'ida. He told debriefers that, to the best of his knowledge, al-Qa'ida never sent any individuals into Iraq for any kind of support in chemical or biological weapons. Al-libi told debriefers that he fabricated information while in U.S. custody to receive better treatment and in response to threats of being transferred to a foreign intelligence service, which he believed would torture him… He said that later, while he was being debriefed by a (REDACTED) foreign intelligence service, he fabricated more information in response to physical abuse and threats of torture. The foreign government service denies using any pressure during al-Libi's interrogation. In February 2004, the CIA reissued the debriefing reports from al-Libi to note that he had recanted information. A CIA officer explained that while CIA believes al-Libi fabricated information, the CIA cannot determine whether, or what portions of, the original statements or the later recants are true of false.[15] 

Some speculate that his reason for giving disinformation was in order to draw the U.S. into an attack on Iraq, which al Qaeda hoped would lead to a global jihad. According to a book written in November 2006, “a Moroccan using the pseudonym Omar Nasiri, having infiltrated al-Qaeda in the 1990s, authored the book, "Inside the Jihad: My Life with al Qaeda, a Spy's story". In the book, Nasiri claims that al-Libi deliberately planted information to encourage the U.S. to invade Iraq. Nasiri said al Libi "needed the conflict in Iraq because months before I heard him telling us when a question was asked in the mosque after the prayer in the evening, where is the best country to fight the jihad?" al Libi said Iraq was chosen because it was the "weakest" Muslim country, according to Nasiri. Nasiri suggested in an interview with a British television station that al-Libi wanted to overthrow Saddam and use Iraq as a jihadist base. In the book, Nasiri describes al-Libi as one of the leaders at the Afghan camp and characterizes him as "brilliant in every way." Nasiri explains that learning how to withstand interrogations and supply false information once captured was a key part of the training in the camps. Nasiri claims that al-Libi "knew what his interrogators wanted, and he was happy to give it to them. He wanted to see Saddam toppled even more than the Americans did.".

So, Al-Libi knowingly provided the CIA and DIA with a red herring in the hope that it would result in exactly the way in which it did: the invasion of Iraq. After this ruse succeeded, he recanted his story upon being returned to CIA custody in 2004. But what is worse, everyone in the Bush administration knew it was a red herring. The invasion went forth anyway. Hmm? 

Ibn al-sheikh al-Libi’s whereabouts had been a mystery for several years. However, the first independent confirmation of Libi's whereabouts came just two weeks prior to his death. Heba Morayef, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said she and a colleague met him briefly in a courtyard at the Abu Salim prison on April 27. The two were there to examine the treatment of prisoners in Libya, including other detainees once held by the United States. Libi angrily rejected speaking to the researchers, saying, "Where were you when I was being tortured in American prisons?" according to Morayef, who described the encounter in a phone interview. Human rights groups had long suspected that Al Libi had been transferred to Libya, but the CIA had never confirmed where he was sent. Oddly, his rediscovery coincided with the release of the Torture Memos. 

Personally, I find it strange that his location would be once more publicly determined and then shortly thereafter, amidst the uproar surrounding the release of the memos, he would be found suddenly dead in a Tripoli jail cell due to “suicide”. Given what this fellow knew, his death seems much too convenient. Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation into his death. They pointed out that the closed nature of prisons means that all prisoner deaths warrant investigation, but that given the special nature of al-Libi’s case, his death merits special scrutiny. “The Libyan authorities should authorize an investigation into al-Libi’s death that is transparent, thorough, and impartial,” a spokesperson said. The head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch, Tom Malinowski, recently said, "I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration. He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war." 

Now that Exhibit A has been permanently removed, it seems certain that this is because he was bound to show up before a court or commission charged with the investigation of the Bush administration’s use of torture, either in Spain or America. One deeply wonders what song this bird would have sung had he been given the chance. His testimony would have unquestionably been the smoking gun that would have revealed that the torture he received was not for “national security” but for the personal political aims of Bush and Cheney and the rest of the neo-con New World Order and its oligarchical tyranny. That is why he is now dead. 

And so, the entire pretense of the Bush administration’s “national security” agenda is washed away. Cheney, who has recently presented himself publicly in the last few weeks probably more than at any time during his eight years in office, which seems very strange, has been spewing on any American talk show that will have him bullshit about how certain he is that the interrogation methods that were ordered by his office were effective (it’s becoming clear that his office, not Bush’s, was the epicenter for the torture program). He recently said on Face the Nation, “two memos that I personally know of, written by the CIA, that lay out the successes of those policies and point out in considerable detail all of -- all that we were able to achieve by virtue of those policies, …should be released, be made public”.

First of all, the "two memos... that lay out the successes of those policies," couldn't possibly discount that torturing detainees enhanced the ability of terrorists to recruit new supporters nor, needless to say, the obtaining of false information a la Al Libi. So, even if the memos in question reveal productive results, those results were, at best, a push when considering the policy's impact on US national security. Second, and more importantly, how can two memos vindicate policies that were in clear violation of prescriptions within the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture? This is a matter of law and US obligations to its international treaties, which the Constitution explicitly states the US will respect and enforce. The memos, even if they support what Cheney suggests, are illustrative of a policy that was blatantly illegal. What has become crystal clear, more than ever, is the illegality of the Bush regime, and as I consider the extent which its still entrenched New World Order forces will go to maintain power, evidenced now with the murder of Al Libi, I am getting angrier and angrier. 

Listen clearly as I tell you that the foremost basis for the “War on Terror”, the 9/11 attacks, were Made to Happen on Purpose. It was an inside job manufactured and carried out by sinister forces within the American government, of which the Bush regime was the spearhead at the time, in order to spread New World Order totalitarianism. Proof of this is voluminous and easily accessible. All those who deny it are either staked to the neo-con New World Order or are not able to handle the truth. "'Go, go', said the bird. Humankind can't bear much reality". Further, though much harder to prove, the current international economic crisis has also been Made to Happen on Purpose. It also was an inside job manufactured and carried out by sinister forces within the American government, namely by the Federal Reserve and the shadow cabal of international Banker elites that it serves, and its aim is to destroy the middle class, particularly in America; a program that has been successfully running for several decades now, but elsewhere too. Its purpose is to drive the world into poverty, making everyone equally as poor as a Chinese peasant, and thus so much easier to control.

My whole interest in seeing the Bush regime taken to court is not because I feel that torture was its most abhorrent crime, but that all of its crimes, particularly the 9/ll conspiracy and the subsequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and tens of thousands of U.S. service members either killed or badly wounded in a war that was based on lies, lies and more lies and fortified and promoted by the most sadistic torture, needs to be punished - severely. This matter with torture just happens to be the most solid case that we have against them. May it be prosecuted successfully and to the fullest.