The Missing Terrorist

A group of House members is pressing the White House to provide answers for the first time to one of the biggest mysteries of the debate over pre-Iraq War intelligence: what really happened to captured terrorist leader Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi-once considered one of the U.S. military's most prized catches in the war on terror?

Al-Libi, who ran one of Al Qaeda's biggest training camps, was the principle source for former secretary of State Colin Powell's claim to the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein's regime had helped train Al Qaeda in chemical and biological weapons. But as first reported by NEWSWEEK three years ago , al-Libi later recanted his story about Iraqi weapons training, forcing the CIA to withdraw all its reporting based on his assertions.

A newly updated edition of the book, " Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War "-co-written by the author of this article and David Corn and published this week in paperback-quotes from declassified CIA operational cables that suggest that al-Libi had been brutally tortured by the Egyptian intelligence service and coerced into making his claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction training for Al Qaeda.

The cables indicate that al-Libi told agency debriefers in February 2004 that he "fabricated" his story about the weapons training only after his Egyptian interrogators crammed him into a tiny box for 17 hours. His account appears to be the first public description of a controversial  "aggressive" interrogation technique called a "mock burial," in which interrogators make their subjects believe they are being buried alive in a bid to elicit information.

In a May 24 letter to President Bush, the House members pushed for answers. "We are deeply concerned that an important facet of your administration's case that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States, which has been demonstrated as false, rested upon information extracted through torture by a foreign intelligence service," wrote Democratic Reps. Ed Markey and William Delahunt of Massachusetts and Jerrold Nadler of New York. Markey is sponsor of a bill to halt the CIA's practice of "rendering" suspects to foreign countries for interrogation; Delahunt is chairman of a House Foreign Affairs Oversight subcommittee that is investigating the rendition issue.

Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said today that the White House had just received the letter and will review it. "Prewar intelligence has already been exhaustively reviewed by the Congress, as well as an independent commission, that led to a restructuring of the intelligence community," he added.