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Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
Hi, I'm Scott Horton.
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Full interview archives are available at scotthorton.org.
More than 2,500 interviews now going back to the spring of 2003.
Okay, so first up on the show today is Hanan Salah from Human Rights Watch, part of this, I guess, help write this report from last month, delivered into enemy hands.
U.S.
-led abuse and rendition of opponents to Qaddafi's Libya.
Welcome to the show.
Hanan, how are you?
Thank you very much.
I'm in New York awaiting the hurricane, as everybody else.
Oh, well, I hope you're in a tall building and will not be washed away.
Hopefully.
Okay, well, thank you very much for joining us and taking time out from your flight from danger to speak with us here.
Very important work that you did here.
I'm sorry it took me so long to get you all on the show to talk about it.
Again, it's Human Rights Watch, hrw.org.
It's called Delivered into Enemy Hands, U.S.
-led abuse and rendition of opponents to Qaddafi's Libya.
Now, of course, Qaddafi was a bad guy for many, many years and was a bad guy again last year.
America took part in a war to overthrow him.
And yet, in the meantime, somewhere right around 2003 through 2011, or through 2010, I guess, Qaddafi had been brought back in from the cold by the United States and the United Kingdom and had made himself quite useful to the Bush regime when it came to taking care of Libyan members of, well, not even necessarily Al-Qaeda, I guess, as I read this report of y'all's.
Libyans captured anywhere but Libya by the CIA, I guess, is the best way to characterize it.
Is that about right?
So what happened, basically, what this report was about was in the period, especially during the 2005-2006 period, a large number of Libyans that had been caught by the U.S. forces obviously operating outside of the U.S., and also with the implication of other intelligence services, U.S. intelligence services, but also others, that we mentioned in our report.
Libyans that had been fighting or that had been traveling outside of Libya and that had been accused of being a part of what the U.S. classified as a terrorist organization were rounded up in secret CIA detention centers, mainly in Afghanistan.
And there, of course, we found out about, we found extensive interviews with people that were kept there, some of them for over a year, some of them close to two years, that had to endure horrible forms of ill-treatment and torture.
What happened, however, after that, and of course this is all in a nutshell, but what happened after that is that these people, despite clearly stating having fears of being brought back to Libya, because at the time it was the Gaddafi regime, his security apparatus in charge, so these people that had been persecuted in Libya and that had left Libya on very bad terms with the government at the time were then forcefully rendered back to Libya.
They were there subjected to imprisonment and some of them were subjected to quite severe forms of ill-treatment and torture.
I guess the one thing we were talking about there is I had sort of, I began to say, well, these are members of Al-Qaeda or something who were grabbed by the CIA and brought to who knows where before Libya, but that wasn't necessarily true.
It says in the introduction to this report here that some of these men had fought on the side of the U.S. and the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet Union back in the 1980s and they had basically just stuck around in Afghanistan.
They weren't necessarily friends of Osama or Zawahiri at all, they just were Arab Afghans, and so that's Al-Qaeda enough to the CIA in 2001 and 2002, is that correct?
That is a correct estimate.
Most of these men or a large part of them were actually a part or they were members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
This was a group that was established basically as a form of, this was a group that was established to get rid of the Qaddafi regime and his entourage.
These were people that were not known to us, but these people were not in any way affiliated to Al-Qaeda.
They were members of a different Islamic Fighting Group and some of them were members of the other groups that you described that they were helping to fight against the Soviets.
Were they even foot soldiers for the Taliban or anything?
Absolutely not.
This is, again, a big misunderstanding.
We have no indication, nothing.
This was an extensive report that we wrote.
We spoke with a large number of people.
We spoke with 14 people, and this is what basically our report is based upon, 14 people that were former detainees in these secret CIA, most of them in secret CIA detention facilities, and these people had been traveling around the area.
They had been fighting as jihadists in Afghanistan, in Pakistan.
Some of them had been living and working in areas as remote as Mauritania or even in Southeast Asia, but none of them alleged that they were in any way affiliated to these large terrorist groups that you spoke about.
Well, I'm not sure if this is the proper standard to apply, but it seems like if Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton just fought a war for these very same men last year to put them in power, then they must not be that bad, right?
I mean, again, what these people endured and what this report is about is that these are people that were caught by foreign intelligence services.
They were brought to secret detention facilities in several countries across the world, but the biggest or the most important testimony that we have are the ones that were held in secret CIA custody in Afghanistan, and they had to really endure horrible forms of torture.
We have even discovered that at least one person has been waterboarded, which is a difficult person has been waterboarded, which is contrary to what has so far been claimed and admitted by the U.S. government.
Some of these people actually, and this is the irony of it, is that some of the people that we interviewed you will now find have quite important role in Libya today.
Some of them are party members, are political parties.
They have joined the political party scene, and some of them are in the Libyan military.
So they have regular jobs.
They have regular roles.
Well, and I'm sorry for belaboring that one point for so long, but I just fear that people's reaction to this, and over the years they've been trained to just answer, well, these people are terrorists, so who cares about them?
So I always think it's important to, I mean, because really, you know, I'm against torturing anybody, whether they're a terrorist or not, but the point being that, hey, what if you're just some guy, and you get nabbed by the CIA, and they take you to a dungeon beneath Thailand and torture you, and then send you off to Gaddafi to be tortured to death, you know, to finish you off?
Then that's not quite fair, is it?
You know, even for the pro-torture, there's still a problem with torturing innocent people, right?
And that's what I'm trying to get at, is just because the CIA grabs somebody or someone else grabs somebody and hands them over to the CIA, it doesn't mean that they're guilty of anything at all, much less plotting to kill us on 9-11.
I mean, the interesting thing is that, and this touches upon, of course, what you said, is that none of these people are now facing or being prosecuted for any crimes that they have allegedly committed.
All of these people were arrested or caught or even kidnapped in some cases without there being any proof of any wrongdoing.
They were possibly in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I mean, who's to know that?
However, I mean, again, we go back to that point, whereas these people were not prosecuted, and these people were not given a fair trial.
They were simply put in a secret detention facility where they were tortured.
Then they were taken out, and they were rendered by force to a country that they objected to being rendered to, or they were brought back forcefully to endure even more hardship.
They have, until now, not been able to get any kind of compensation for the time that they spent in these prisons.
They were not able to sue anybody for the time that they lost with their family.
All right.
Now, I wanted to get back to what you were just mentioning about at least one of these victims, captives, describing the water torture.
He doesn't call it waterboarding.
I don't know if he ever heard the term before.
He just told you, well, this is what they did to me, and that's waterboarding, all right.
But that immediately puts the perjury to Michael Hayden and every other government official who claimed that only Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, and I forget the one other guy, were waterboarded.
Because this guy's describing his treatment not at a secret former Soviet base in Poland.
He's describing what happened to him in Afghanistan at, I don't know, at Bagram or at the Salt Pit.
Do you know?
I happen, I did speak with Mohammed Shariah, the person that you were talking about, in person, and I was actually a part of the interview for that.
So, I mean, he described what happened to him very accurately.
He, you know, he alleged that all of this happened to him.
He believed he was in Afghanistan at the time.
And, you know, as you rightly say, and as I mentioned just before, that, you know, we are within this report, you know, we have at least one person that we have interviewed that claims that he was waterboarded in that time.
Of course, the focus is now going to be on waterboarding because of what, you know, the U.S. government, what government officials swore under oath.
However, you know, other detainees that we interviewed, and if you go through the report, you will see that, you know, others have claimed to some form of torture that included water as well.
However, that can't be technically seen as waterboarding.
And, of course, this now opens up the discussion, how many others were possibly tortured in this manner or were waterboarded in this manner?
Even others that, you know, we haven't managed to interview.
Right.
Well, and, you know, the water torture, what's important about that to me is just the fact that at best Hayden and the rest are using, you know, Clintonian language to redefine what is is and, you know, whether or not this or that counts as waterboarding when it's some kind of water torture or not.
But I always thought that the waterboarding, maybe it just captures the imagination.
I don't know why so much more than than the other techniques.
But it seems to me it oftentimes serves to obscure the fact that they were, you know, basically tying up and beating up tens of thousands of people all across Iraq and Afghanistan.
And people went not Al Qaeda guys, but whoever got grabbed a lot of the times were put through the worst kind of tortures and abuses.
And, you know, just in your opening paragraph here in this Human Rights Watch report, you describe something that looks like, you know, it sounds like it's something out of a medieval dungeon, something you'd see in a Gary Larson Farside cartoon or something where the guy's hanging from the dungeon wall and in some strange stress position.
And I'm trying to find the paragraph where it says, but some of them in diapers, you say, just left there for weeks and weeks, chained to the wall in some dungeon.
Like, you know, America is, you know, some kingdom in Europe 900 years ago.
I think that what you describe is pretty accurate.
And, you know, throughout the work that I helped do on this report, I have come across some of the most severe and some of the worst forms of torture.
If it's even okay to do a classification, then I would say that this is something that we have, unfortunately, had to delve into while writing this report.
There were many forms of torture and ill treatment that were practiced, you know, in these secret detention facilities.
Some of them included these forced stress positions that you rightfully talked about, where somebody is either chained to a wall or somebody is forced into a certain position and is kept there for a very long period of time.
There was also other forms of more direct ill treatment, including, you know, beatings or certain, you know, with objects or without objects, people being suspended from the ceiling for a long period of time.
And there's also, of course, the more psychological or mental form of ill treatment or torture that, you know, we describe and we have seen as well.
For an adult male to be kept in diapers for days on end sometimes, you know, is a very distressing factor.
There were distressing and very intrusive searches that were conducted on some of these detainees.
There's, you know, we also describe at length, you know, the actual buildings and the actual facilities that people were being kept in, the darkness, you know, the very loud blasting music at times and, you know, where people would be put in a situation where they would completely lose a sense for time and space.
I think that, you know, some of the techniques are even too graphic to actually be described on your show.
However, in order to be consistent and, you know, for the United States government, I believe that, you know, there are obligations that the U.S. government should adhere to.
There are very credible allegations of torture and ill treatment that, you know, many of them we have been finding since September 11th.
And I think that this is our key request here towards the United States government is to conduct a credible investigation into all of these allegations.
And if found, and if they do find that, you know, something of the sort did happen, that there would be a system of compensation to ensure that, you know, all the victims can obtain some sort of redress.
And the first step for that, of course, is for the government to actually acknowledge that abuses took place, that they took place and that, you know, the CIA did conduct certain activities, especially in the period after September 11th.
Well, you know, the other Scott Horton, the heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer from Harper's Magazine, I read his blog entry that he wrote reviewing this study.
And he pointed out quite correctly that the Department of Justice told the CIA and the military, do whatever you want.
If you torture somebody to death, we know you meant well and that you were only trying to prevent greater harm and, you know, all this kind of stuff.
So, in other words, they're all guilty.
And the Justice Department has a monopoly on being the Justice Department in America.
You can't create a new Justice Department in Nebraska somewhere and have it indict the Justice Department for torturing people to death.
So, in other words, they get away with it because they're in charge of prosecuting themselves.
Simple as that.
The United States government still has obligations.
The convention of torture and the United States signatory has obligations with regard to that, meaning that no, of course, nobody should get away with that.
In the same sense that we are asking the militias in Libya that are currently operating with impunity and that are also conducting their activities and are torturing people in their prisons to be held responsible for these crimes.
I strongly believe that everybody should be held responsible for any crimes that were committed.
And torture is a crime.
Torturing somebody, you know, is a criminal act against another person.
And the first step is for the government to acknowledge that these abuses actually took place and to ensure that these people are able to seek some sort of redress for all the time that they have, all the suffering that they have endured.
Well, and you know, I mean, geez, we're living right now with the consequences of this administration's failure to prosecute the last administration.
They have established impunity for their own behavior.
So that right now, you still have the Obama administration when they don't just outright assassinate someone.
A lot of times they kidnap people from all over the world and they send them to Afghanistan where the Supreme Court says other courts can't reach.
And so they have the Bagram prison and the wink-wink, nudge-nudge, real Bagram prison over the hill, the not-so-secret one, where they rendition people from all over the world.
And then according to Jeremy Scahill and Eli Lake, the former of which is a good reporter, there are two different prisons in Somalia where Obama is torturing people or having his Somali sock puppets torture people for him.
And the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command are working hand-in-glove with them on that project.
So this is what happens, right?
And then, of course, there are all these news stories about how, gee whiz, maybe the torture power will be passed on to Mitt Romney.
And there's already been a memo leaked from inside his team about how, yeah, if he becomes president, we want to reinstitute the torture regime.
The degree to which Obama has kept it up hasn't been enough for the Republicans.
They want to get back to the Cheney years.
And that's because of the impunity that comes with immunity.
I mean, of course, politics aside and elections aside, this problem or this issue that we are talking about dates back from post-2001.
It is something that was in the Bush era.
And the people that were responsible at the time should be held responsible for whatever crime they have committed.
It is every government's responsibility.
Whoever is in power, it is every government's responsibility to, and this is the responsibility of the current administration, is to actually look into crimes that were committed in the past, regardless of who is in power or who could be in power within the next few months.
It doesn't make any difference.
And in any case, not for us to decide.
The problem with the culture of impunity is that it doesn't stop the abuses.
The problem with that is that there could be a repetition any time.
There could be a repetition of these past abuses if this culture of impunity prevails.
Yeah, you're certainly right.
And, you know, when you talk about the Convention Against Torture, people ought to know that.
It's the U.S. that forced that thing on the rest of the world, you know, by bribes and threats and every other thing they possibly could to say like, hey, Earth, we need to outlaw torture and be like us, the Americans.
We don't torture people because we're better than that.
And that's where that comes from.
I mean, torture, as I mentioned before, this is an obligation that, you know, the U.S., like any other government, has.
It's an international obligation to do something about any practices that are committed of this sort.
And in the same way that, you know, you would expect another government or you would hold another government accountable, you know, the U.S. government should be standing to its own standards as well.
All right.
Now, to get back to Libya here a minute, I wanted to let you talk about Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi.
He's the guy that accused Saddam Hussein of training al-Qaeda how to make chemical weapons and how to hijack airplanes under duress, correct?
Yeah, I think you have it correct.
These are the allegations or these are the claims, at least.
Right.
But the point is that the CIA tortured him into saying that.
And there was no truth to it at all, but there was a war in Iraq partially based on that so-called intelligence, which Colin Powell even cited at the U.N., I believe.
I mean, rolling back the history of this specific individual, this was the claim that was made.
This was allegedly the story that was brought up.
And, yes, based upon that, there definitely was a reason or was a part of what led to that war.
And then so I'm trying to remember now, was he taken to Thailand first?
Or I guess can you just catch us up?
Where was he arrested?
Where was he held and tortured?
And then at what point did they give him back to Qaddafi?
Well, he was, I mean, the information that is, of course, known about him is that he died in a prison in Libya in 2009 under very conspicuous circumstances.
According to the Libyan authorities at the time, they alleged that he committed suicide.
That is, of course, not something that the, of course, while he was in a Libyan prison, that is not something that his family agrees with.
You know, we have obtained information from them, and we have seen information and photos that show certain bruising and beatings on his body that would not corroborate the story that he committed suicide.
These are new pictures that you guys have gotten a hold of?
Yes, I mean, this is the evidence that we talk about.
This is the information that we talked about in our report.
I think there was a lot of skepticism when he came up dead back in 2009, that, oh, yeah, he killed himself, huh?
Isn't that convenient?
But now you guys have pictures taken of his body that day that show these bruises.
So that's extremely important, worthy of its own headline.
I mean, the information and the, from what we know from his family members and other people that were detained with him while he was in CIA custody, they spent some time with him in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
We corroborated some information surrounding his death.
The photos that we have seen, that we have been privy to with regards to, they were allegedly taken the day before he died, meaning that there was possible violence committed against him, which may not corroborate the old story that he necessarily committed suicide.
And now, of the 14 prisoners you all studied, I forgot exactly the numbers, how you break it down, but it was something approximately half were tortured by Qaddafi and half weren't tortured by Qaddafi.
Is that about right?
And then secondarily.
There's a number, I mean, in the report, there's a number of people that were not or did not claim to be ill-treated upon their return to Libya.
So was it your guys' conclusion that the ones who were mistreated by Qaddafi, they were mistreated by Qaddafi because the CIA had specifically requested that?
There are different ways of probably looking at that kind of conclusion.
So the people that were brought back were all forcefully rendered.
Some people were then released from prison at some point and some people were never released.
Some people remained in prison until this latest conflict.
They were in prison all this time.
They spent even time and many of them spent time and income without attention, meaning that they had no contact at all why they were in prison in Libya.
They had no contact at all to the outside world.
They had no access to a legal process.
They had no access to their families or to a lawyer.
Okay.
Well, we're all out of time.
Actually, we're a little bit over time.
I want to thank you so much for your time and for this great work on this report, Hanan.
Well, thank you very much.
Thank you very much for having me on.
Everybody, that's Hanan Salah, and I'm sorry if I said your name wrong, Hanan Salah from Human Rights Watch.
And, again, the report is titled Delivered into Enemy Hands, U.S.
-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Qaddafi's Libya.
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