Show Trials in Benghazi
Will the UN insist on Fair Trials for Ex-Regime Loyalists in Libya?
by FRANKLIN LAMB
Benghazi, Libya
An affable gentleman, "Mahmoud" ushered this observer into the Benghazi People's Court (Mahkamat al-Sha'b) and showed me the freshly painted courtroom where on December 19, 2006, the current NTC leader and long term CIA favorite, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, twice upheld death sentences by firing squad against a Palestinian doctor, Ashraf al-Hujuj, and five Bulgarian nurses Kristiyana Valtcheva, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka, and Snezhana Dimitrova. The death sentences were requested by the Libyan prosecutor in his opening statement four months earlier, in the final appeal in the fake HIV show trial case # 607/2003 held at the criminal court in Benghazi.
The appellate judge in the case was none other than the current head of the NATO-installed Libyan National Transition Council (NTC) Mustafa Abdul Jalil, whose formal legal education consisted of sitting in on some Sharia law classes. Following his appellate decision in the case, and for other services rendered to the former regime, Jalil was rewarded with the post of Minister of Justice. He served loyally in that position until American associates encouraged the intensely ambitious Minister to resign on February 24, 2011, the day he joined the Benghazi based uprising, as "leader."
In the Benghazi nurses case, "Judge" Jalil knew the defendants were innocent and had been regularly and severely tortured during years of incarceration and forced into making false confessions which they later recanted. He also knew that the families of the false government witnesses against the "Benghazi Six" had been threatened with death if their relative failed to testify that it was the defendants who injected 426 Libyan children with HIV at the al-Fateh hospital in Benghazi. Jalil was also fully aware that, as the Libyan and International medical community knew, unsanitary conditions at the hospital caused the spreading of the HIV virus which originated in Benghazi from African guest workers, well before the arrival of the Palestinian and Bulgarian humanitarian medical staff.
During his "judicial review", Jalil ignored the most elementary rules of criminal trial procedure and did not appear to grasp the fact that without procedural rights no accused person possesses substantive rights.
From day one of the "Benghazi Six" proceedings, which spanned more than five years, it was a political exercise. The same appears certain to be the case from the moment of the the opening of any trial conducted in Libya of high profile ex-regime loyalists including Saif al Isam, Abdullah al-Senussi, Abu Zeid Dorda, former Libyan Prime Minister al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi, former vice foreign minister Khaled Kiam, and others. If their trial is held in Libya, it is not at all certain that these accused will still be alive when the courtroom proceedings begin. This is because of the current lawlessness and political jockeying among NTC power centers and a widespread thirst across Libya today for revenge which trump international notions favoring just trials.
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