Friday, October 27, 2006
AFP: Confession that formed base of Iraq war was acquired under torture: journalist + WP: U.S. Detentions Draw British Criticism
Confession that formed base of Iraq war was acquired under torture: journalist
Thu Oct 26, 8:37 PM ET
An Al-Qaeda terror suspect captured by the United States, who gave evidence of links between Iraq and the terror network, confessed after being tortured, a journalist told the BBC.
Iban al Shakh al Libby told intelligence agents that he was close to Al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and "understood an awful lot about the inner workings of Al-Qaeda," former FBI agent Jack Clonan told the broadcaster.
Libby was tortured in an Egyptian prison, according to Stephen Grey, the author of the newly-released book "Ghost Plane" who investigated the secret US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prisons that housed terror suspects around the world.
US President George W. Bush confirmed the existence of the network of CIA holding facilities overseas during a September 6 speech defending controversial US interrogation practices.
Libby was apparently taken to Cairo, Clonan told the broadcaster, after being captured in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
"He (Libby) claims he was tortured in jail and that would be routine in Egyptian prisons," Grey said.
"What he claimed most significantly was a connection between ... Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. This intelligence report made it all the way to the top, and was used by (former US secretary of state) Colin Powell as a key piece of justification ... for invading Iraq," he told the broadcaster.
Powell claimed in a UN Security Council meeting in February 2003, weeks before a US-led coalition invaded Iraq, that the country under Saddam Hussein had provided weapons training to Al-Qaeda, saying he could "trace the story of a senior terrorist operative", whom Grey alleges is Libby.
"At the time, the caveats to say this intelligence was extracted under torture were not provided," Grey said.
Grey said that, after being held in Egypt, Libby was transferred to a secret CIA facility in Bagram, just north of Afghanistan's capital Kabul. The journalist said he had also met other people held in that facility who describe the torture that Libby faced at the CIA facility.
Since then, "he disappeared", Grey said.
"Like hundreds of other people arrested after September 11, he's vanished into a sort of netherworld of prisons where astonishingly, President Bush now says the prisons have emptied.
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By BETH GARDINER
The Associated Press
Thursday, October 12, 2006; 11:12 AM
LONDON -- The detention of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay is unacceptable and counterproductive, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said Thursday, underlining an increasingly critical British line on the U.S.-run prison from America's closest ally.
Beckett, releasing Britain's annual report on human rights around the world, said that detention without trial of hundreds of suspects was "unacceptable in terms of human rights" and "ineffective in terms of counterterrorism."
The report called for the camp to be closed and said Britain welcomed President Bush's statement that the he hopes to see the camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, shut down.
"It's widely argued now that the existence of the camp is as much a radicalizing and discrediting influence as it is a safeguard for security," she said.
Beckett's strong words came on the same day that the Court of Appeal upheld the government's refusal to seek the release of three of the six British residents still held at Guantanamo.
Prime Minister Tony Blair so far has gone no further in public than calling the camp an "anomaly" that sooner or later must end.
But two senior legal officials, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith and Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, spoke out against the U.S. detention policy earlier this year.
In June, Falconer had denounced the detention center in eastern Cuba as a "recruiting agent" for terrorism, and described its existence as "intolerable and wrong."
In a speech in Washington last month, Falconer said the U.S. policy of "deliberately seeking to put the detainees beyond the reach of the law" was a "shocking ... affront to the principles of democracy."
Falconer said that was the British government's view, not simply his own opinion.
Goldsmith said in May that "the existence of Guantanamo Bay remains unacceptable."
Nine British citizens were released from the camp in March 2004 and January 2005 after the Foreign Office made formal requests to the United States.
Six British residents who hold other citizenship remain in the camp. They are among the hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo, accused of links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or al-Qaida. Only a handful have been charged since the camp opened in January 2002.
In the case of the six, the government argued that it had no duty to represent the interests of residents who were not citizens.
Attorneys had argued that the three in the appeals court case _ Iraq-born Bisher al-Rawi, Jordanian Jamil el-Banna and Libyan-born Omar Deghayes _ should have the legal rights available to British citizens because they had been given indefinite leave to live in Britain.
Deghayes' sister, Amani, said the family was not seeking special treatment for him, but only wanted his fundamental human rights to be respected.
"Omar has already been held for over four years without charge or trial, a complete travesty of justice," she said in a statement Thursday.
In the report released Thursday, Beckett said human rights and counterterror efforts should go hand in hand, arguing that rights abuses only provoke extremism. The report also criticized repressive regimes it said had used democracies' adoption of tough anti-terror laws as cover for their own, more authoritarian, crackdowns. It did not specify which nations it was referring to.
Rights groups have criticized the Blair administration's own attitude toward human rights, claiming it has been complicit in the use of secret CIA prisons, the existence of which were acknowledged by Bush in September.
Blair's government has denied allowing the U.S. to use British airports to conduct so-called extraordinary rendition flights, allegedly used to ferry prisoners to and from the secret prisons.
Separately, the report criticized rights abuses in nations including Iran, Sudan, Syria, Cuba and Zimbabwe. Less harshly, the report raised concerns about violations in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Russia ad China, and acknowledged there were still major troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
