Is Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman, the man suggested by U.S. government officials to be Egypt’s new leader, personally responsible for the brutal torture and disappearance of countless people using U.S.-approved “enhanced interrogation techniques”?
The evidence is overwhelming that he was trained and cultivated for just such a role. Suleiman is thought of fondly in U.S. intelligence circles. According to a recent piece in The New Yorker, he acts as the “CIA’s point man in Egypt for renditions—the covert program in which the CIA snatched terror suspects from around the world and ‘returned’ them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.”
Ron Suskind wrote in The One Percent Doctrine that a rendition victim, whose torture testimony was used to make the fraudulent connection between al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 2003 conflict, would “be handed over to Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s intelligence chief and a friend of [CIA director George] Tenet.”
In their book Hubris, Michael Isikoff and David Corn recount how the tortured man, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, eventually recanted his confession, saying he gave false information to Egyptian interrogators because “they were killing me . . . I had to tell them something.”
Where did Suleiman learn to be so effective at torture and (mis)information extraction? Could it have been, in part, from the United States?
