Human Rights Watch: Bush Administration Subjected Libyan Prisoners To Waterboarding

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A Human Rights Watch report out Thursday alleges that during the Bush administration, Libyan revolutionaries were subjected to rendition, waterboarded by the CIA, then turned over to the Gaddafi regime to face more abuse.

Host Lisa Mullins speaks with report author Laura Pitter, who says the evidence disproves the CIA line that only three individuals were waterboarded by the agency.

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Lisa Mullins: A new report by the group Human Rights Watch seems to lift the lid on another piece of recent U.S. intelligence history. It contradicts a C.I.A. claim that the spy agency subjected just three terrorism suspects to waterboarding during the Bush Administration. The report alleges the technique was used more than the C.I.A. has acknowledged. Specifically, it says the C.I.A. subjected several Libyan detainees to abuse, including waterboarding, and that the C.I.A. then handed them over to the Gaddafi regime for more abuse. Muammar Gaddafi was still in power then. Human Rights Watch bases its findings on interviews with former detainees and documents that came to light after Muammar Gaddafi was toppled last year. Some the individuals who claimed to have been abused are now in key leadership positions in the new Libyan government. That’s a government the U.S. helped to bring to power and is now funding. If you’re having trouble understanding why the C.I.A. might abuse men who they then would later help to overthrow Gaddafi, think back to 2004. The Bush Administration’s War on Terror was in full swing and the relationship between the U.S. and Gaddafi’s Libya was positively cozy. Colonel Gaddafi had agreed to give up his weapons of mass destruction and Washington was happy to have a friend in the region after the Iraq invasion. When Libyan fighters were captured in Afghanistan, cooperation between intelligence services followed. Laura Pitter wrote the Human Rights Watch report and she says that Libyan fighters may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but their reasons for being in Afghanistan had nothing to do with the jihad against the west.

Laura Pitter: They’d been working to overthrow Gaddafi from various bases around the world for the last 20 years. One of them was Afghanistan. There were also bases in Sudan. They tell us that they basically were the only place that they could exist without proper documentation from their own governments and train and work to overthrow their government, but they do say that they had absolutely no animosity towards the U.S. and were completely opposed to the views of Osama bin Laden and actually confronted him with their opposition to those views personally.

Mullins: Could you tell us about some of the Libyans who you talked to, you interviewed, who say they had been targetted by the U.S. and tortured by the U.S.?

Pitter: So of the number of Libyans that we spoke to, there were five who had been taken to a black site in Afghanistan that we believe was run by the C.I.A. and they were held there for between eight months and two years and they were subject to very serious abuses, where they had been chained naked in their cells in pitch darkness for months. Beaten, slammed against walls, one he appears to have been waterboarded. He didn’t say he was waterboarded, but what he described is waterboarding. He was put on a wooden plank, strapped down, hood over his face, and while guards who were masked stood over him and a doctor was present water was poured over his face and mouth to the point where he felt as though he was going to suffocate and he said this happened numerous times. More times than he can count, in fact, and then another detainee that we spoke to who was held for two years was subject to a similar type of water torture, essentially. It was the same thing, but it didn’t happen on a board. The U.S. government has admitted to waterboarding three individuals and they’ve named the individuals and they’ve said the number of times that they’ve been interviewed, but they’ve that it only happened to three people.

Mullins: And none of them were among the people that you talked to? These Libyans?

Pitter: That’s correct.

Mullins: So that’s a pretty incendiary charge then against the government. Do you feel comfortable with the testimony that you got from these men? That what they’re saying about waterboarding and other forms of abuse at the hands of the U.S. are valid?

Pitter: I mean, we have. I have sources who’ve confirmed that they were in C.I.A. custody. Their testimony was very credible. We talked to them all independently. They all confirmed various details about the site independently of each other. Also, we spoke to a number of them in Libyan prison in 2009 and in fact the gentleman who was. Who says he was waterboarded, had actually told our researcher at the time it was one in a litany of abuses that he said went on at this place. He really had no idea of the significance of it.

Mullins: So after these men were sent back to Libya by the United States, what happened to them then?

Pitter: Well, they were subject to abuses in Libyan custody. Most of them were held up until the civil unrest let them out of jail last year. They’d just received summary trials. Some of them said it lasted about an hour and long prison sentences. Some of them were sentenced to death. There were abuses, physical abuses, but they were more isolated than the U.S. abuses. They weren’t pervasive and going on all the time. Some were beaten. Some were subject to electric shocks. Most, all of them, were put in solitary confinement for a substantial period of time.

Mullins: That’s Laura Pitter, who is the counter terrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch and the author of the report Delivered Into Enemy Hands: U.S.-led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya. We asked the C.I.A. for a response to the report’s allegations, which contradict the official agency line that only three detainees were waterboarded. The C.I.A. sent us an email statement that says the agency stands by it’s official account. You can read the full statement. It’s at theworld.org.

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Human Rights Watch video, detailing the accusations:

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CIA Statement:
“The Agency has been on the record that there are three substantiated cases in which detainees were subjected to the waterboarding technique under the program. Although we cannot comment on these specific allegations, the Department of Justice has exhaustively reviewed the treatment of more than 100 detainees in the post-9/11 period—including allegations involving unauthorized interrogation techniques—and it declined prosecution in every case.”

We can also offer the following on the record on why the US had dealings with Qadhafi and the Libyans, without of course commenting on any specific allegations:

“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. That is exactly what we are expected to do.”

“The context here is worth revisiting. For example, by 2004, the US government had convinced Qadhafi to renounce Libya’s WMD programs and to help stop those terrorists who were actively targeting Americans.”

John Tomczyk
Chief, Media Relations
CIA Office of Public Affairs

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