Remember that guy that supposedly just killed himself in a Libyan prison? This is what happened to him back in January 2002:

Captured terrorist Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi is transferred to CIA custody after a battle royale with the FBI and a personal plea from CIA director George Tenet to the President. The FBI, with experience in collecting evidence for trials, advocates treating the captive humanely, even bargaining with him. One high-ranking FBI officer instructs Libi’s handlers to “handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York.” The CIA wants information quicker. “They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo,” an ex-FBI official will later say. “At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, ‘You’re going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I’m going to find your mother and I’m going to fuck her.’

This was the same month that John Yoo (now a columnist at the Philly Inquirer) and Alberto Gonzales concluded that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees in the ‘War on Terror.’ It’s also the month that the first 20 detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay. It’s also the month that Bush delivered the Axis-of-Evil speech.

Once al-Libi arrived in Cairo he was tortured. He fabricated stories about cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

A report from the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) informs top officials that captured Al Qaeda operative al-Libi is likely a fabricator. Periodically after this point, high-level members of the Bush Administration, including the President, will cite al-Libi’s information in public appearances. Colin Powell relies heavily on accounts provided by al-Libi for his speech to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003, saying that he was tracing “the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in [the use of chemical] weapons to Al Qaeda.”

The same DIA report states, “Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements [like al Qaeda]. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.”

He would later recant his fabrications, saying that he only made up the stories to make the torture stop.

On February 8, 2002, Bush made the first of many allusions to the false and coerced testimony of al-Libi.

Bush, citing the highly suspect testimony of captured Al Qaeda operative al-Libi, says in a radio address, “Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.”

With all the new heat on Dick Cheney, do you think he might want al-Libi dead? What do you think Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson thinks about that possibility? Read between the lines.

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just “committed suicide” in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)

He died at quite a convenient time. He won’t be able to corroborate what McClatchy is reporting, which is that Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted testimony linking al-Qaeda to Iraq and that they ordered torture in order to get it. Could Cheney get to a man in a Libyan prison? I think so. I think Col. Wilkerson thinks so, too.

You wanna know what his last reported words were? Human Rights Watch researcher Heba Morayef visited him in his Libyan prison this April.

She said Fakhiri [al-Libi] appeared for just two minutes in a prison courtyard. He look[ed] well, but was unwilling to speak to the Rights Watch team, she said. “Where were you when I was being tortured in American prisons?” she quoted him as saying.

What did our former vice-president have done?