Over at Wired News, Spencer Ackerman points to one grisly detail in a lengthy report just released by Human Rights Watch, about how the US cooperated with the Gadhafi regime in Libya:
This is a drawing of a locked box which a Libyan man says U.S. interrogators once stuffed him into. It's said to be about three feet long on each side. Only once during his two years in detention was the detainee put in the box; his confinement there lasted over an hour. The circles are small holes, into which his interrogators "prodded him with long thin objects."
It wasn't the only box that the CIA allegedly placed him inside. Another was a tall, narrow box, less than two feet wide, with handcuffs at the top. The detainee, Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed al-Shoroeiya, says he was placed into that one with his hands elevated and suspended by the handcuffs, for a day and a half, naked, with music blasting into his ears constantly through speakers built into the box. A different detainee describes being placed into a similar box for three days and being left with no choice but to urinate and defecate on himself.
The box was "only the start" of this man's woes, as the CIA then delivered him and at least four others to Gadhafi's strongmen, who then tortured him even more brutally for the crime of political opposition.
The Human Rights Watch report documents the stories of those detainees, and illustrates how the CIA "works with unsavory regimes."
Commenting on the HRW report, a CIA spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal it was considered routine for our government to work with the Gadhafi regime at the time.
By 2004, the CIA had convinced Mr. Gadhafi to give up his weapons of mass destruction and back U.S. efforts to combat terrorism. "It can't come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats," she said. "That is exactly what we are expected to do."
From HRW, an overview of the report contents:
This report is based on interviews conducted in Libya with 14 former detainees, most of whom belonged to an armed Islamist group that had worked to overthrow Gaddafi for 20 years. Many members of the group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), joined the NATO-backed anti-Gaddafi rebels in the 2011 conflict. Some of those who were rendered and allegedly tortured in US custody now hold key leadership and political positions in the country.
