Who is Omar Suleiman

Omar Suleiman is a longtime ally of the United States. He played a key role in the U.S. extraordinary rendition program. He also underwent training in the 1980s at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and Center at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
Newly released classified U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks reveal that Israeli officials have long hoped that newly appointed Egyptian vice president Omar Suleiman would eventually succeed Hosni Mubarak as president of Egypt. In an August 2008 cable, a U.S. diplomat wrote, quote, “There is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Soliman.”
Lisa Hajjar Talking:
Omar Suleiman started his career, in terms of relating to the United States, in the ’80s. In 1993, he became the head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Services, which is just somewhat like the United States CIA. It does external security, but it’s part of the military. In the 1990s for the United States, rendition began under Clinton. It was regular rendition rather than the extraordinary kind. And it was developed very much in cooperation with Egypt, and specifically with Suleiman, because at that time, as al-Qaeda was developing and engaging in attacks in Egypt and Africa and elsewhere, the desire was to be able to pick up, kidnap people and transfer them to countries for trial. And so, in the 1990s, a number of suspected Islamist terrorists were picked up in other countries, transferred to Egypt. So, Suleiman was at that point already facilitating this approach.
And Suleiman, of course, had— not only as the chief of Egyptian intelligence, but also ideologically deeply committed to an anti-Islamist politics, and something that endeared him certainly to George Bush when, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, just within days, President George Bush authorized the CIA to engage in a much different kind of program, establishing the black prisons, the extraordinary rendition program, which meant the right to kidnap people from anywhere and either disappear them into black sites or send them to third countries for torture by proxy. And Egypt was the primary destination, although other countries were also destinations for these American CIA torture flights.
He really has defined himself politically and ideologically as an ardent anti-Islamist, and in that regard—and has very close relations with Israel. He held, has held for years, the Israel dossier for the Foreign Ministry, in addition to his position as the head of security, and so was very much of the same mind as Israel in terms of adamant opposition to Hamas. And even during the period of the Operation Cast Lead, very end of 2008, January 2009, when Israel was militarily attacking and besieging Gaza, and that period, he was the one who facilitated the blockage of Gaza from the Egyptian side. And subsequent to that, he has demolished or overseen the demolition of the tunnels through which both arms but also foodstuffs had been able to go into Gaza. So, he’s also been quoted as saying, sharing in the Israeli position that Gazans should basically be kept on a very strict diet. So, a deeply anti-humanitarian position towards Palestinians.
Egypt was a very significant destination for this torture by proxy. The case of Mamdouh Habib, he was an Egyptian-born Australian citizen who was arrested in Pakistan in 2001. And, Habib’s situation illuminates a much broader phenomenon, just to put this in context. The United States was operating at that time on the assumption that anybody who is in either Afghanistan or Pakistan who was not Afghani or Pakistani should, under former vice president Dick Cheney’s One Percent solution, should be assumed to possibly be a terrorist. And so, that’s why so many people were rounded up and either shipped off to the CIA or rendered to other countries. So Habib was picked up by the Pakistanis, tortured in Pakistan, under questioning with CIA agents present, was then extraordinarily rendered to Egypt, where he was subjected to brutal torture, electric shocks, he was suffocated in water, beaten and hung by his wrists.
But the account that he subsequently, in his own autobiography, My Story, tells is that on one day, when he was being tortured and questioned about his ties to al-Qaeda or concessions to involvement in terror, he was smacked so hard on the face by the person was questioning him that his blindfold was dislodged. And the person was revealed to be Omar Suleiman. And Suleiman was frustrated that Habib, who, as we now know, was absolutely innocent of any kind of ties, but this was the time when, they wanted to get intelligence, regardless of the circumstances and the notion that people were dissembling. So another thing that Habib recounts that Suleiuman did to try and break him was he instructed a guard there in the interrogation room to kill a Turkistani prisoner to show Habib that they were serious. And so, the guard killed the prisoner with what was accounted as a vicious karate kick. And, ultimately, Habib was then sent back to Bagram, ended up in Guantánamo, and was released ultimately because there was absolutely no evidence that he was guilty of anything. But his case, is extremely indicative.
Al-Libi actually was, you know, a militant, had been based in Afghanistan, was someone who was a trainer or ran the al-Khaldan camp. And he was captured fleeing, in November of 2001, fleeing out of Afghanistan, picked up. He ends up in Egypt. And again, many people ended up there. Al-Libi was brutally tortured.
In the early winter of 2003—2002, 2003, the Bush administration was intent on going to war with Iraq. And they wanted evidence to be able to build public support both domestically and internationally. And so, as Scott Horton and others have reported, this was a period when torture and just the intensity of interrogations escalated, because CIA and military interrogators were under incredible pressure to produce the kind of evidence of specifically an al-Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection. And in fact it was al-Libi who gave the information, under torture, in Egypt, that two al-Qaeda operatives had gone to Iraq for training in chemical and biological weapons. However, the confession was false, although it was used by Colin Powell, that along with the yellowcake from Niger sale, the two pieces of evidence that were used to justify the war in Iraq when he spoke to the United Nations in February of 2003. The war begins. Subsequently, we learn that al-Libi’s confession was false, and he said that he had just said whatever his interrogators wanted him to say in order to make the torture stop.
But what becomes interesting is once it’s revealed that al-Libi had recanted his testimony, which once the Iraq war is going so poorly and there are no weapons of mass destruction, al-Libi is then essentially disappeared. no one knows where al-Libi went for a while. He didn’t end up in Guantánamo, and because his people would have wanted to question him about the evidence he had—or the statement he had made in relation to this massively devastating war. In April 2009, several Human Rights Watch investigators were in Libya doing an investigation of Libyan prison conditions, and there they discovered al-Libi. And they saw him and spoke to him, and according to Human Rights Watch, they said he was in relatively OK health and so on. But the fact then they revealed al-Libi is alive, he’s in Libya, and it immediately re-raised the questions of people wanting to speak to him.
This was deeply humiliating to Omar Suleiman, because it was known that he had been tortured in Egypt, he had given a false confession, and this false confession had led to a war that is deeply unpopular. So, in May of 2009, Suleiman flies to Libya in order to meet with his counterpart. And by the time Omar Suleiman’s plane is on its way back to Cairo, al-Libi had committed suicide in his prison cell. So, he’s gone now. No one can ask him about his experience in Egyptian torture chamber.
Suleiman was certainly known to Egyptians, but his record of torture is something that people who follow torture have been aware of for a long time. And I think it’s important now for the media, for particularly progressive media, to be able to bring this story to light. And as it’s filtered back into Egypt, some of these accounts, I think it’s also—this is not the only thing that’s diminishing Omar Suleiman’s legitimacy, but—because he can do that himself every time he opens his mouth, but, certainly this should contribute to it.
Omar Suleiman, the CIA’s Man in Cairo and Egypt’s Torturer-in-Chief.”
Discussion with Lisa Hajjar.
Lisa Hajjar, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-editor of the online journal Jadaliyya.
– from democracynow.org