Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (Arabic: إبْنُ ٱلشَّيْخِ اللّيبي; born Ali Mohamed Abdul Aziz al-Fakheri; 1963 – May 10, 2009) was a Libyan national captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 after the fall of the Taliban; he was interrogated by American and Egyptian forces.
The information he gave under torture to Egyptian authorities[2][3] was cited by the George W. Bush administration in the months preceding its 2003 invasion of Iraq as evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
But, during testimony at their Combatant Status Review Tribunals, several Guantanamo captives, including Zubaydah, described the Khaldan camp as having been run by a rival jihadist organization – one that did not support attacking civilians.
[13] When talking to the FBI interrogators Russell Fincher and Marty Mahon, he seemed "genuinely friendly" and spoke chiefly in English, calling for a translator only when necessary.
[15] Al-Libi told the interrogators details about Richard Reid, a British citizen who had joined al-Qaeda and trained to carry out a suicide bombing of an airliner, which he unsuccessfully attempted on December 22, 2001.
Al-Libi agreed to continue cooperating if the United States would allow his wife and her family to emigrate, while he was prosecuted within the American legal system.
[13] In the second week of January 2002, al-Libi was flown to the USS Bataan in the northern Arabian Sea, a ship being used to hold eight other notable prisoners, including John Walker Lindh.
Then came an even more shocking confession: according to the CIA document, al-Faruq said two senior al-Qaeda officials, Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, had ordered him to 'plan large-scale attacks against U.S. interests in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Cambodia.
[20] In Cincinnati in October 2002, Bush informed the public: "Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.
"[21] This claim was repeated several times in the run-up to the war, including in then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, which concluded with a long recitation of the information provided by al-Libi.
[19][23] Some speculate that his reason for giving disinformation was to draw the U.S. into an attack on Iraq—Islam's "weakest" state, a remark attributed to al-Libi—which al-Qaeda believed would lead to a global jihad.
[27] An article published in the November 5, 2005 edition of The New York Times quoted two paragraphs of a Defense Intelligence Agency report, declassified upon request by Senator Carl Levin, that expressed doubts about the results of al-Libi's interrogation in February 2002.
In July 2002, DIA assessed It is plausible al-Qa'ida attempted to obtain CB assistance from Iraq and Ibn al-Shaykh is sufficiently senior to have access to such sensitive information.
However, Ibn al-Shaykh's information lacks details concerning the individual Iraqis involved, the specific CB materials associated with the assistance and the location where the alleged training occurred.
Conclusion 3 of the report states the following: Postwar findings support the DIA February 2002 assessment that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was likely intentionally misleading his debriefers when he said that Iraq provided two al-Qa'ida associates with chemical and biological weapons (CBW) training in 2000 ...
Al-libi told debriefers that he fabricated information while in U.S. custody to receive better treatment and in response to threats of being transferred to a foreign intelligence service which he believed would torture him ...
[19] In November 2006, a Moroccan using the pseudonym Omar Nasiri, having infiltrated al-Qaeda in the 1990s, wrote the book, Inside the Jihad: My Life with al Qaeda, a Spy's story.
In an interview with BBC2's Newsnight, Nasiri said Libi "needed the conflict in Iraq because months before I heard him telling us when a question was asked in the mosque after the prayer in the evening, where is the best country to fight the jihad?"
Another senior al-Qa'ida detainee told us that Mohammad Atef was interested in expanding al-Qa-ida's ties to Iraq, which, in our eyes, added credibility to the reporting.
Clive Stafford Smith, Legal Director of the UK branch of the human rights group Reprieve, said, "We are told that al-Libi committed suicide in his Libyan prison.
"[39] Hafed Al-Ghwell, a Libya expert and director of communications at the Dubai campus of Harvard Kennedy School, commented: This is a regime with a long history of killing people in jail and then claiming it was suicide.
The head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch said al-Libi was "Exhibit A" in hearings on the relationship between pre-Iraq War false intelligence and torture.
[42] On October 4, 2009, Reuters reported that Ayman Al Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaeda, had asserted that Libya had caused al-Libi's death through torture.