How UK knew Iraq evidence was obtained under torture
THE dramatic police statement of Shaker Aamer l eads to one especially damning conclusion: that Britain must have known socalled intelligence that was used to justify the war in Iraq was based on evidence obtained under torture. This conclusion will have grave implications for Tony Blair, his former Ministers, MI6, the Chilcot Inquiry and Scotland Yard.
It also gives a chilling insight into why Aamer has been held so long in Guantanamo.
His vivid testimony to Scotland Yard includes key sections about a prisoner held with him at Bagram US Air Force base in Afghanistan. He was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi – the informant who ‘revealed’ Saddam Hussein’s alleged chemical and gas weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and links to Al Qaeda.
Aamer told Yard detectives that two British intelligence officers were present when Al-Libi was being abused, and when he was later rendered to Egypt – extraordinarily, in a coffin. It was in Egypt that Al-Libi falsely claimed that Saddam’s Iraq had supplied chemical and biological weapons to Al Qaeda terrorists, and trained them in their use. He ‘confessed’ all this after being locked in a tiny cage for more than 80 hours, and then being severely beaten.
This evidence was seen as so crucial that President Bush used it in a high-profile speech in Ohio.
He told the US people that America knew Al Qaeda had been ‘planning for chemical and biological attacks’ with Iraqi assistance and added: ‘We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.’ This was all based on Al-Libi’s ‘intelligence’.
Top Pentagon officials made similar claims and named Al-Libi personally in background, ‘off the record’ briefings to reporters.
Last year a report by the US Senate intelligence committee confirmed that Al-Libi’s false assertions were cited again by Secretary of State Colin Powell when he made a last-ditch, unsuccessful attempt to persuade the UN Security Council to back the Iraq invasion in February 2003.
Although Blair did not cite Al-Libi’s claims directly, he repeatedly justified the pending war by warning of the risk that Saddam would give WMD to terrorists.
Aamer first met Al-Libi while both men were being brutalised and interrogated at Bagram in January 2002.
His statement to the police says that two UK intelligence officers were present at Bagram while this was happening – and were working closely with their American counterparts.
Aamer told the Yard detectives how he was brought into a Bagram interrogation room where Al-Libi was present, tied to a chair. The interrogators apparently hoped that each man would give up information about the other, perhaps in the hope of securing more favourable treatment.
Aamer’s police statement says: ‘I was a witness to the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in Bagram. His case seems to me to be particularly important, and my witnessing of it particularly relevant to my ongoing detention.’ He adds: ‘Because he was detained in November 2001, and I was one of the first five other prisoners in Bagram where he was being held, I was in a rather unique position as a witness to what was going on with him.
‘He was there being abused at the same time I was. He was there being abused when the British came there.
‘Indeed, I was taken into the room in the Bagram detention facility where he was being held. Clearly the fact that I was a witness to all this does not make the US want to let me free, for fear that I may be a witness to one of the most colossal mistakes of all those made in the last eleven years.’
SINCE making his police statement, Aamer has given further details to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. He told The Mail on Sunday that from his nearby cage, Aamer saw a coffin being taken into the interrogation room where he had seen Al-Libi.
Later, he saw the coffin being taken out, and assumed the pris- oner had died. Other sources – of whom Aamer was unaware – have said that when Al-Libi was taken to Egypt from Bagram, he was shipped out of the base in a coffin.
Stafford Smith added that Aamer’s witnessing of these events may well be the real reason why his release from Guantanamo has been delayed for so long: he was first cleared for freedom in 2007.
‘Al-Libi’s torture and its disastrous consequences amount to the single most embarrassing event in the history of the war on terror,’ the lawyer said.
Al-Libi’s treatment later is further evidence of the scale of the intelligence fiasco, Stafford Smith said.
After leaving Egypt, he was held in other secret CIA prisons until 2006, but then was rendered to Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya and jailed. He died there in prison in 2009.
According to a newspaper owned by Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, he committed suicide, but because he was a devout Muslim, many consider this unlikely. ‘He was probably murdered,’ Stafford Smith said. ‘For some, this was a very convenient outcome.’
Only one aspect of this is graver for all interested parties: Aamer is set to elaborate even more on what he knows when he is finally released.