'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Al-Libi's coerced 'information' = crud

Douglas Jehl has a piece in today's NYT about the fact that the information "gleaned" from CIA interrogations of high-ranking Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was subsequently recanted by him--and the "information" in question was subsequently "discredited".

So much for the justifications for torture based on the "necessity" of using it to get information about imminent threats, and the "value" of the information thus obtained.

This is especially significant, because the alleged "info" that al-Libi gave his interrogators was about how Saddam's Iraq had allegedly "provided training in chemical and biological weapons to members of al-Qaeda", and was a good part of the purported "evidence" that was used to jerk US and UK citizens into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

Juan Cole has a lengthy post on his blog today, the gist of which is that maybe al-Libi's "confession" was part of a much bigger, and very fiendish campaign by the Qaeda leadership to jerk the US into the war against Iraq... as part of an even broader campaign that jerked the US into the invasion of Afghanistan and also sought to rupture US-Saudi ties.

It's a daring theory. Personally, I believe the Iraq and Saudi parts of it are much more persuasive than the Afghan part... After all, Qaeda lost a very valuable safe haven as a result of the US invasion of Afghanistan; whereas the overthrow of Saddam's regime and the weakening of the House of Saud were very much in its interest...

Be that as it may, the big question about the whole al-Libi interrogation story still remains about that of the notable ineffectiveness of trying to gain useful information from a captive through torture...

One could give two broad explanations of al-Libi's alleged "confession": (1) that the "information" he gave was consciously devised DIS-information (as per the Juan Cole theory), or (2) that the "information" that he allegedly supplied--this was sometime in 2002, it seems-- was what he "gave" to over-zealous torturers with the goal of having them ease up on his treatment some...

Whichever theory turns out to be the case, one then has to account for his subsequent retraction.

But given the importance of that so-called "information", I think that we all need to know a lot more about the circumstances of his interrogation.

Who has the records of the interrogation? Of course, we don't know what form they might take; and almost certainly they don't include a complete record of everything that was done to him in each phase of it... But there must be some documentary records, transcripts, etc. And there must be some record of who the CIA officers or contractors were who carried out the interrogations.

Those individuals should all be subpoenaed by the Senate Intelligence Committee and asked to give their acounts, on oath, of what happened during the interrogations. All the written and/or viedotaped records of the interrogation should be subpeonaed, too.

And then, Mr. al-Libi himself should come before a public court hearing sometime, too. All these different pieces of evidence will then help us understand exactly how that faulty information got inserted into the US system of "intelligence". And also, along the way, just how dysfunctional any reliance on torture is to the rational pursuit of good intelligence.

How much longer can we allow this terrible black hole of detainee mistreatment to continue?