Exit the Colonel (25 page)

Meanwhile, the clandestine services of both the US and UK were exploiting the new relationship with the Libyans to ramp up their antiterror campaigns, most notably by involving Libya in a complex web of extralegal renditions of so-called enemy combatants, captured in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and cooperative states—first Egypt and Tunisia, now Libya, for interrogation (which appears in many cases to have involved direct torture). In 2007, information about “ghost flights” began to surface: a breach-of-contract dispute filed in New York in 2007 revealed some details of the commercial contracts for a Gulfstream V jet based at Washington Dulles airport that made numerous flights to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East around the same time that terror suspects were flown to various cooperating countries.
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Documents uncovered by Al Jazeera after the fall of Tripoli to the rebels in August 2011 appear to confirm that Libya was one of the countries involved and to provide details of UK complicity.

The Al Jazeera documents describe, with respect to Libya, a degree of closeness among the US, UK, and Libyan intelligence services previously out of the public view. “Your achievement in realizing the Leader's initiative has been enormous and of huge importance,” a British official wrote to a senior Libyan intelligence counterpart. “At this time sacred to peace, I offer you my admiration and every congratulation.”
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The discoveries prompted the British government to convene the Gibson inquiry, named for its chairperson, a prominent British judge, in September 2011. The panel subsequently announced that MI6 and CIA cooperation with Libya was “much closer than previously acknowledged” and included at least eight separate renditions.
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In January 2012, UK Justice Secretary Ken Clarke announced that the inquiry had been abandoned in light of Libya's own police investigations.
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Human rights groups had boycotted the inquiry from the start, after intelligence agencies' insistence that most of the proceedings be held in secret.

Former CIA counterterrorism specialist Michael Scheuer has explained that the rendition program originated in the agency during the Clinton years as a means to bring Osama bin Laden to justice (and presumably to extract information) without “having to grant terrorism suspects the due process afforded by American law.”
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Cofer Black, then head of counterterrorism at the CIA, testified before the House and Senate Intelligence committees that 9/11 was, effectively, the year the rendition program came into its own.
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After 9/11, the Bush administration deployed a group
of politically appointed lawyers within the Justice Department and the White House. They were to prepare legal opinions supporting the notion that, within the context of the war on terror, the US was not bound by either the Geneva Conventions, which governed treatment of prisoners of war (the solution would be to create a new category of stateless warriors, “illegal enemy combatants”) or the 1984 UN Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by the US in 1994. Regardless of who else in the government knew of the program, senior officials at the State Department disavowed any information concerning what the CIA was or was not doing.

Egypt had been the most obvious first implementation partner for rendition policies, given its government's close relationship to the US, the fact that Egypt received some $2 billion a year in US aid, and its own long-standing reasons for wanting to extract information from Muslim extremists. Libya shared the same animosity for Islamist groups and thus was presumably also amenable to participating in any project that would deliver enemies of the state straight to Libya for questioning—and worse.

Embarrassingly for the West, some of individuals “rendered” emerged to play significant roles in post-2011 Libyan politics. Libyan nationals Sami Al Saadi and Abdelhakim Belhaj accuse the UK of involvement in their involuntary repatriation to Libya in 2004. Belhaj, one of the founders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Gaddafi's nemesis Islamist organization, led the final assault on Bab Al Azziziya in August 2011 in coordination with NATO forces. Belhaj claims he was apprehended in Malaysia in 2004, transfered to Thailand for CIA interrogation, and then rendered by the CIA back to Libya's Abu Selim prison.
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In April 2012, the BBC revealed that the UK government had agreed to assist with the Gaddafi regime's request for Belhaj's rendition in 2004 and informed “foreign intelligence agencies” (i.e., the CIA) that Belhaj was in Bangkok.
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“We are planning to arrange to take control of the pair [Belhaj and his then pregnant wife] in Bangkok and place them on our aircraft for a flight to your country [Libya],” one of the CIA handlers wrote. Communications regarding other rendees carried the banal proviso, “Please be advised that we must be assured that [the prisoner] will be treated humanely and that his human rights will be respected.”
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Another Libyan national targeted by the rendition program was Ibn al-Shaykh al Libi, a paramilitary trainer for Al Qaeda, who was captured in Afghanistan by Pakistan and turned over to the FBI, from whose custody the CIA sent him to Egypt for interrogation.
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Al Libi was later identified as the source of a critical piece
of flawed intelligence senior Bush administration officials used to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and thus to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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The Libyan government claimed al Libi committed suicide in his cell in May 2009 (but never allowed an outside investigation).
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The testimony of another Libyan-born rendee adds further color to this process. Abu Sofiyan Bin Qummu says he was captured in Pakistan and delivered to the Americans, who kept him in a cell in Kandahar (Afghanistan) where he was interrogated while naked and set upon by trained dogs. The Americans, he claims, then flew him to Guantanamo, Cuba, where he was held for six years in a barred cage and subjected to “all kinds of inhumane torture,” before being extradited back to Libya in an American plane, via the Yemeni capital of Sana'a, and hand-delivered to the Libyans, who put him in the Abu Selim prison until he was released in 2010, as part of Saif 's Islamicist rehabilitation program. Abu Sofiyan Bin Qummu denies ever having been a member of Al Qaeda and says his journey to Pakistan had to do with escaping incidents back in Libya: “Had I actually been with Al Qaeda, the Americans would have left me alone,” he says. While Belhaj has publicly said he bears the US no permanent grudge, Abu Sofiyan Bin Qummu is less forgiving: “I still have problems with the Americans.”
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At the time Belhaj was rendered, both the current US State Department Human Rights Reports and Human Rights Watch had detailed extensive domestic human rights abuses in Libya. These specifically included torture, poor conditions, impunity, arbitrary arrest, incommunicado detention, lengthy political detention, denial of fair public trial, and so on.
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Indeed, many officials within the State Department were well aware of what was going on at the Justice Department and the White House, and were “horrified” by what was happening:

It is unclear whether specific individuals were targeted for rendition because the West had reason to believe they had information, or whether the Libyans, as the Egyptians were thought to have done before them, simply drew up a list of people they wanted for their own purposes (dissidents,
for example) with the cover that their interrogation would produce information pertinent to the war on terror. Former State Department officials said these arrangements mirrored those Washington had carried out a few years before with the Algerian regime. That regime had also attempted to exploit Washington's obsession with Al Qaeda to have members of the military arm of the principal opposition, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), delivered to Algeria.
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In the case of Libya, the fact that the George W. Bush administration had declared the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG)—whose primary target was Gaddafi—a terrorist organization in 2003, assisted in justifying renditions of LIFG-affiliated members back to Libya.

After these policies came to light, Jack Straw, the UK foreign minister under Blair, attempted to defend himself in 2011: “No foreign secretary can know all the details of what intelligence agencies are doing at one time.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not have the (however implausible) deniability of Straw, after verbally approving a CIA request to employ waterboarding and other interrogation techniques as early as July 2002.
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In a similar vein, a CIA spokeswoman said simply, “It can't come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats.... [T]hat is exactly what we are expected to do.”
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Human Rights Watch countered, “It remains a stain on the record of the American intelligence services that they cooperated with these very abusive intelligence services.”
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While the US media treated the ghost flights as a relatively insignificant coda to a long list of other human rights abuses occurring during the Bush watch, this collaboration is highly relevant and significant to the nature of the US-Libya relationship at this time because it severely hampered efforts by the US and participating nations to put serious pressure on Libya to respect human rights or any reform. All Gaddafi (or his advisers) had to do—and perhaps did do—when asked to moderate his behavior on any number of outstanding issues, was remind his handlers that he was doing some of their dirty work.

Given the lack of information about the intelligence that might have come to light, it remains difficult to quantify whether the CIA's dealings with Libya benefited anyone but Gaddafi himself. Sources in the public domain allege
that the gains were, in fact, not negligible, and included information on Libyans who fought or were trained in Afghanistan and/or who had been associated with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), including Anas el Libi and Abu Layth al Libi,
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files on LIFG assets in Britain, and other LIFG operatives with suspected ties to Al Qaeda.
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Information provided by the Libyan regime was to have led to the formal US designation of LIFG as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
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Musa Kusa, perhaps acting as a double agent, was supposed to have provided valuable intelligence to the Americans and British, including names of black market suppliers, transporters, and dealers in nuclear parts.
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Libyan intelligence was to have enabled international authorities to shut down portions of A.Q. Khan network operating through Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates.

Yet other sources cast doubt on the depth and usefulnesss of the intelligence payoff. While former senior LIFG members are known to have defected to Al Qaeda, I have been unable to find any sources attesting to anything but a weak operational link between Al Qaeda and LIFG—or confirmation of the overwhelming operational value of the information provided by the Libyans (of course, much of the material was classified). Other sources suggest that a good fraction of the information derived from Libya on this count was, to borrow a line from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “known unknowns.” Retired State Department officials with access to intelligence on these issues confirm their understanding of the primitive nature of the Libyan WMD program at the time (“less developed than the Iraqi program before bombing of the Osiris facility by the Israelis in 1981”), and more generally, the fact that while Libya had an extensive intelligence bureaucracy, it was operationally weak, ill motivated, and incompetent.
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The years after Libya's removal from the tightest tethers of the international sanctions straitjacket demonstrated very clearly the consequences of the West not putting together a robust road map or formal agreements to govern Gaddafi's rehabilitation. The US and the UK, principally, were so obsessed with completing other narratives regarding terror and nuclear proliferation, all bolstered by significant commercial interests, that they simply never stated what Gaddafi was expected to do, in fact
must
do, in return to remain in their good graces. As a result, there were major, known human rights abuses continuing long after Libya had been removed from the terror list, from the EU arms embargo, and so on—including the killing of dissident Daif al Ghazal, the continued incarceration of the Bulgarian nurses, etc. Further, the US actually had to coax Gaddafi to pay
the last tranche of damages to the Lockerbie families—which legally, it was not obligated to pay because the US did not meet the deadline for full normalization of relations, codified in a document that committed the US government to certain actions, but which the US government did not have a direct hand in drafting.

Further, because these troublesome items, like the case of the Bulgarian nurses and the release of convicted Pan Am bomber Megrahi, for example, had not been part of or covered by the original deals, they were susceptible to pressure by commercial and political interests that inevitably had insinuated themselves into the dialogue during the intervening period. In many ways, Gaddafi had performed brilliantly, turning negatives into positives and liabilities into assets, all at the expense of the West. He was now free to purchase as many weapons he wanted, from the same people who were trying to quarantine him.