The sound of whipping and screams is heard in Libya

I confess I had been thinking of having a go at Amnesty, which last week posted on the web (it's still on the Guardian site) an infantile attack on me. I found this pretty galling, as I have been a member of Amnesty for about 30 years and am currently paying them £24 a year in subscriptions. How then is it right for them to use £400 of their funds on such tripe, which isn't even an intelligent argument against the death penalty? Note also the anti-Israel propaganda attached to it.

But this morning they changed my mind, by doing the job they've always been best at – recounting, without fear or favour, the truth about torture and repression.

Their latest report 'Detention Abuses Staining the New Libya' , answers a question I posed in a recent article here. What was the new regime doing to its opponents?

Here's the answer:

'The new authorities in Libya must stamp out arbitrary detention and widespread abuse of detainees, Amnesty International said today (12 October), as it published a new report revealing a pattern of beatings and ill-treatment of captured Gaddafi soldiers, suspected loyalists and alleged mercenaries in western Libya.

'Since late August, armed militia have arrested and detained as many as 2,500 people in Tripoli and al-Zawiya. During late August and September, Amnesty researchers visited 11 detention facilities in and around Tripoli and in al-Zawiyah, and interviewed approximately 300 prisoners.'


'None of those seen by Amnesty had been shown any kind of arrest warrant and many were effectively abducted from their homes by unidentified captors carrying out raids on suspected Gaddafi fighters or loyalists. Detainees were almost always held without legal orders and mostly without the involvement of Libya's General Prosecution authority. They were held by local councils, local military council or armed brigades - far from the oversight of the Ministry of Justice.'

And then : 'Amnesty says there is clear evidence of torture in order to extract confessions or as a punishment. At least two guards - in separate detention facilities - admitted to Amnesty that they beat detainees in order to extract "confessions" more quickly.
In one detention centre Amnesty found a wooden stick and rope, and a rubber hose, of the kind that could be used to beat detainees, including on the soles of their feet - a torture method known as falaqa. In another they heard the sound of whipping and screams from a nearby cell. The organisation said that detainees appear to suffer beatings and torture particularly at the start of their detention, being given a "welcome" on arrival.'

The report notes that children have not been spared, that 'arrested' persons   are sometimes bundled into the boots of cars or shot in the legs, and jeered at by their captors. It also confirms a fear I expressed:  'Sub-Saharan Africans and black Libyans remain particularly vulnerable to arbitrary arrest on account of their skin colour and the belief that al-Gaddafi forces used African mercenaries to fight forces loyal to the NTC. While al-Gaddafi forces used foreign fighters – particularly towards the end of the conflict – the targeting of dark-skinned individuals is based on widely exaggerated claims about mercenaries made early in the conflict by forces opposed to Colonel al-Gaddafi, and fuelled by discriminatory attitudes in Libyan society.'

There are pictures of lacerated backs, accounts of beatings with electric cable, wrists tied by wire, candles lit on prisoners' heads, all the weary normal catalogue of cruelty that one can expect in the prisons of despotisms.

And the scale of this is obviously large.

One can only wonder what has been happening elsewhere, where Amnesty has not penetrated.  Now, if this is the case, it seems to me that a very large part of the righteous justification for the whole event dissolves. Where now all the utterly biased reporting of the conflict as if it was a straightforward combat between good and bad? Where now the justification that we were 'protecting civilians'? I think I must keep asking if there have been massacres as well as mistreatment? How would we know?

By the way, I have recounted instances , during the conflict, in which it was unquestionably the case that NATO bombs killed innocent civilians.