Delivered Into Enemy Hands - Human Rights Watch

This report is based mostly on Human Rights Watch interviews with 14 former detainees
now residing freely in post-Gaddafi Libya and information contained in Libyan government
files discovered abandoned immediately after Gaddafi’s fall (the “Tripoli Documents”). It
provides detailed evidence of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees in US custody,
including a credible account of “waterboarding,” and a similar account of water abuse that
brings the victim close to suffocation. Both types of abuse amount to torture. The allega-
tions cast serious doubts on prior assertions from US government officials that only three
people were waterboarded in US custody. They also reflect just how little the public still
knows about what went on in the US secret detention program.
The report also sheds light on the failure of the George W. Bush administration, in the
pursuit of suspects behind the September 11, 2001 attacks, to distinguish between Islamists
who were in fact targeting the United States and those who may simply have been
engaged in armed opposition against their own repressive regimes. This failure risked
aligning the United States with brutal dictators and aided their efforts to dismiss all
political opponents as terrorists.
The report examines the roles of other governments in the abuse of detainees in custody
and in unlawful renditions to Libya despite demonstrable evidence the detainees would be
seriously mistreated upon return. Countries linked to these accounts include: Afghanistan,
Chad, China and Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, the Netherlands,
Pakistan, Sudan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.
Finally, the report shows that individuals rendered to Libya were tortured or otherwise illtreated
in Libyan prisons, including in two cases where the Tripoli Documents make clear
the United States sought assurances that their basic rights would be respected. All were
held in incommunicado detention—many in solitary confinement— for prolonged periods
without trial. When finally tried, they found that the proceedings fell far short of international
fair trial standards.
Most of the former detainees interviewed for this report said they had been members of
the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group (LIFG)—a group opposed to Gaddafi’s rule that began to
organize in Libya in the late 1980s and took more formal shape in Afghanistan in the early
1990s. At that time, Islamist opposition groups were springing up across the Middle East,
DELIVERED INTO ENEMY HANDS 2