US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya

Human Rights Watch Report based on Secret Intelligence Documents Discovered in Libya

WASHINGTON D.C. (HRW) – The United States government during the Bush administration tortured opponents of Muammar Gaddafi, then transferred them to mistreatment in Libya, according to accounts by former detainees and recently uncovered CIA and UK Secret Service documents, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. One former detainee alleged he was waterboarded and another described a similar form of water torture, contradicting claims by Bush administration officials that only three men in US custody had been waterboarded.

The 154-page report, “Delivered into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya,” is based on interviews conducted in Libya with 14 former detainees, most of whom belonged to an armed Islamist group that had worked to overthrow Gaddafi for 20 years. Many members of the group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), joined the NATO-backed anti-Gaddafi rebels in the 2011 conflict. Some of those who were rendered and allegedly tortured in US custody now hold key leadership and political positions in the country. [LIFG is listed as a FTO by US State Department]

The report is also based on documents – some of which are being made public for the first time – that Human Rights Watch found abandoned, on September 3, 2011, in the offices of former Libyan intelligence chief Musa Kusa after Tripoli fell to rebel forces.

The interviews and documents establish that, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US, with aid from the United Kingdom (UK) and countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, arrested and held without charge a number of LIFG members living outside Libya, and eventually rendered them to the Libyan government.

The report also describes serious abuses that five of the former LIFG members said they experienced at two US-run detention facilities in Afghanistan, most likely operated by the CIA. They include new allegations of waterboarding and other water torture. The details are consistent with the few other first-hand accounts about the same US-run facilities.

Other abuses reported by these former detainees include being chained to walls naked -sometimes while diapered – in pitch black, windowless cells, for weeks or months; restrained in painful stress positions for long periods, forced into cramped spaces; beaten and slammed into walls; kept indoors for nearly five months without the ability to bathe; and denied sleep by continuous, very loud Western music.

U.S. Justice AG Holder will hold no official accountable

Despite overwhelming evidence of numerous and systematic abuses of detainees in US custody since the September 11 attacks, the US has yet to hold a single senior official accountable. Only a few low-ranking enlisted military personnel have been punished.

On August 30, 2012, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the only criminal investigation the Department of Justice had undertaken into alleged abuses in CIA custody, headed by special prosecutor John Durham, would be closed without anyone being criminally charged. Holder had already narrowed the scope of Durham’s investigation on June 30, 2011, limiting it from the original investigation into the 101 people believed to have been in CIA custody to the cases of only two individuals.

In both cases, the detainees had died, one in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. The inquiry was also limited in that it looked only into abuses that went beyond what the Bush administration had authorized.  It could not cover acts of torture, such as waterboarding, and other ill-treatment that Bush administration lawyers had approved, even if the acts violated domestic and international law.

Scores of the documents that Human Rights Watch uncovered in Libya also show a high level of cooperation between the Gaddafi government in Libya and US and the UK in the renditions discussed in the report. The US played the most extensive role in the renditions back to Libya. But other countries were also involved, even though these governments knew and recognized that torture was common during Gaddafi’s rule. Countries linked to the accounts about renditions include: Afghanistan, Chad, China and Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Sudan, Thailand, and the UK.