Open thread for night owls: Libyans claim Bush & Blair governments tortured them

Human Rights Watch has published a new report, Delivered Into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi's Libya. Based on interviews with 14 Libyans after the fall of the regime of Muammar al-Qadafi, the report raises new questions about whether the Bush administration only waterboarded three individuals, as it has long claimed. None of them, officials in that administration have said, were Libyan. Critics have long suspected the number was higher. If true, the stories told by the interviewed Libyans would make the case for more.
Several of the Libyans said they were rendered to Libya nine years ago even though, at the time, the Qadafi government was known to practice torture far worse than waterboarding. U.S. law forbids transferring prisoners to nations where they would be at risk of torture.

The majority of the men were members of the anti-Qadafi Libyan Islamist Fighting Group (LIFG). They had fled the Tripoli regime in the 1980s and wound up fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation. When that war ended, they remained in Afghanistan and were there when the United States invaded to take on al-Qaeda and the Taliban after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

They gave detailed accounts of their capture and treatment at "black sites" run by the Central Intellgence Agency:

The abuse allegedly included: being chained to walls naked'sometimes while diapered'in pitch dark, windowless cells, for weeks or months at a time; being restrained in painful stress positions for long periods of time, being forced into cramped spaces; being beaten and slammed into walls; being kept inside for nearly five months without the ability to bathe; being denied food and being denied sleep by continuous, deafeningly loud Western music, before being rendered back to Libya. The United States never charged them with crimes. Their captors allegedly held them incommunicado, cut off from the outside world, and typically in solitary confinement throughout their Afghan detention. The accounts of these five men provide extensive new evidence that corroborates the few other personal accounts that exist about the same US-run facilities. One of those five, before being transferred to Afghanistan, as well as another former LIFG member interviewed for this report, were also held in a detention facility in Morocco.

New evidence of 'waterboarding' torture and a similar practice during interrogations: One former detainee, Mohammed Shoroeiya, provided detailed and credible testimony that he was waterboarded on repeated occasions during US interrogations in Afghanistan. While never using the phrase 'waterboarding,' he said that after his captors put a hood over his head and strapped him onto a wooden board, 'then they start with the water pouring'. They start to pour water to the point where you feel like you are suffocating.' He added that, 'they wouldn't stop until they got some kind of answer from me.' He said a doctor was present during the waterboarding and that this happened numerous times, so many times he could not count. A second detainee in Afghanistan described being subjected to a water suffocation practice similar to waterboarding, and said that he was threatened with use of the board. A doctor was present during his suffocation-inducing abuse as well. The allegations of waterboarding contradict statements about the practice from senior US officials, such as former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who testified to the Senate that the CIA waterboarded only three individuals'Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Former President Bush similarly declared in his memoirs that only three detainees in CIA custody were waterboarded. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has also denied the use of waterboarding by the US military.

The 15-page report demonstrates once again that much remains to be learned about how the United States dealt with suspected terrorists during the early years of the Bush administration.

At Wired, Spencer Ackerman writes:

A drawing of the positions captive Libyans say their U.S. captors held them in
during the early months of their detentions in 2001-2002.

This is a drawing of a locked box which a Libyan man says U.S. interrogators once stuffed him into. It's said to be about three feet long on each side. Only once during his two years in detention was the detainee put in the box; his confinement there lasted over an hour. The circles are small holes, into which his interrogators 'prodded him with long thin objects.'

It wasn't the only box that the CIA allegedly placed him inside. Another was a tall, narrow box, less than two feet wide, with handcuffs at the top. The detainee, Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed al-Shoroeiya, says he was placed into that one with his hands elevated and suspended by the handcuffs, for a day and a half, naked, with music blasting into his ears constantly through speakers built into the box. A different detainee describes being placed into a similar box for three days and being left with no choice but to urinate and defecate on himself.

Meanwhile, the men and women who ordered torture remain free to collect their lecture fees and take their book tours.

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