Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the Libyan rebel commander elected to be in charge of the military committee keeping order in Tripoli, says he does not seek revenge on the people who abducted him from Malaysia, tortured him, and returned him to Libya. Instead, Belhaj seeks justice.
"Definitely it was very hard, very difficult," Belhaj said. "Now we are in Libya, and we want to look forward to a peaceful future. I do not want revenge." ...
“If one day there is a legal way, I would like to see my torturers brought to court,” he said.
Considering that Belhaj believes the United States tortured him and not Col. Qaddafi's Libya, he may be looking forward to a lifetime waiting for his day in court facing those he accuses of his torture. Belhaj claims:
He was detained by Malaysian officials in 2004 on arrival at the Kuala Lumpur airport, where he was subjected to extraordinary rendition on behalf of the United States, and sent to Thailand. His pregnant wife, traveling with him, was taken away, and his child would be 6 before he saw him.
In Bangkok, Mr. Belhaj said, he was tortured for a few days by two people he said were C.I.A. agents, and then, worse, they repatriated him to Libya, where he was thrown into solitary confinement for six years, three of them without a shower, one without a glimpse of the sun.
Newly discovered documents found in the office of Libya's former spymaster, reports the New York Times, allegedly corroborate Belhaj's account.
Belhaj's nom de guerre was Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq. As Sadiq, Belhaj was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). The group's goal was to overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration designated the LIFG as a terrorist group allied with al Qaeda.
In early 2004, the Libyans asked their CIA contact to locate Sadiq and return him to Libya. According to the alleged documents discovered in the Libyan spymaster's office, the CIA officer "promised to do their best to locate him".
Two days later, an officer faxed the Libyans to say that Mr. Sadiq and his pregnant wife were planning to fly into Malaysia, and the authorities there agreed to put them on a British Airways flight to London that would stop in Bangkok. “We are planning to take control of the pair in Bangkok and place them on our aircraft for a flight to your country,” the case officer wrote.
The veracity of these documents coming from Libya may be suspect. But if they do indeed prove to authentic, then the Bush administration has tangled America into an Qadaffi's web than previously was known.
Qadaffi saw the assassination plots by LIFG and Islamic Martyrs' Movement against him as a significant threat and played the Bush administration to protect his hold on power. Qadaffi could have possibly used the specter of bin Laden to inflate the link between Libyans opposed to his regime with al Qaeda, so the Bush administration would then assist him in squashing Libyans opposed to his harsh rule.
Belhaj, for his part, "says he has no Islamic agenda. He says he will disband the fighters under his command, merging them into the formal military or police, once the Libyan revolution is over."
However, Belhaj's military experience came from the Islamic jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. After the Soviets' withdrawal, he returned from Afghanistan and helped formed the LIFG. Once its secret base was discovered and destroyed by Qadaffi, he escaped Libya in the late 1990s and lived his life on he run from Qadaffi's oil-powered influence.
“We focused on Libya and Libya only,” he said. “Our goal was to help our people. We didn’t participate in or support any action outside of Libya. We never had any link with Al Qaeda, and that could never be. We had a different agenda; global fighting was not our goal.”
"We like and appreciate what NATO did for us", Belhaj told the Los Angeles Times, but even so, he said he still might sue the CIA over his alleged torture. Belhaj seems excited to be part of the Libya's new future, but…
Not everyone is happy with the turn of events.
"Belhadj is a bad man," said one former CIA operative with long experience in the Middle East who declined to be identified. "He's a capable Al Qaeda field leader.... Belhadj was a serious enough actor for us to find him, kidnap him and render him. He's somehow had a conversion to democracy? What do they base that on? It's just a pipe dream."
What a mess.
I think that, perhaps, if the United States truly wants a peaceful relations with a new post-revolutionary Libya, then we Americans need to honestly look back at the past decade (and beyond) and hold accountable the men and women in our government who broke our laws. We need to have justice for the United States to have any international credibility. Allegations of torture and war crimes should be addressed by our justice system and not wait for those less forgiving to seek revenge on our country.
In order to be able to look forward, we must come to terms with our past. We need to bring alleged torturers and those who ordered and planned its use to justice.