It’s unclear what has happened to Fathi al-Jahmi, the Libyan dissident about whom our Eli Lake wrote Friday. Mr. al-Jahmi’s family has not heard from him since March 26, two weeks after he was released from the prison in which he spent more than two years. At the time of his last phone call to America, an angry mob, organized by Libyan security services, surrounded Mr. al-Jahmi’s home in Tripoli, claiming to protest his appearances on Arab television stations where he called Colonel Gadhafi’s rule illegitimate.

When the authorities learned he was not content to be silent, they cut his phone lines and jammed his cell phone, as authoritarians have done for decades to their dissidents. Mr. al-Jahmi’s family now believes he may have been abducted. “I want to know where Fathi and his family is. God knows what they are doing to him or where he is. We need clarification. We need to restore communications,” his brother Mohammed told us yesterday.

The plight of the 63-year old civil engineer has become the focus of a small cadre of Libyan exiles and activists inside the country as they push the regime to open up. Like many dissidents, Mr. al-Jahmi spent some time working with the regime. Between 1970 and 1971, Mr. el-Jahmi was the governor of the oil-rich province of al-Khaleej. But he spoke out against Mr. Gadhafi in 1973 when it be came clear the strongman had no intentions of holding elections.

Here is what he had to say on March 26 to the new American-funded Arabic language satellite television station, Alhurra: “The Gadhafi regime is trying to suppress any possible change in the civil society, any sign of democracy and human rights, and the liberation of the ‘prisoners of conscience’. It’s a dictatorship that acts violently and has no other way to act. I ask the international community to put this regime on trial for what he did with the Libyan people, the Lockerbie case, the UTA, and all the immoral things he did against humanity and the Libyan people.”

Far from putting Mr. Gadhafi’s regime on trial, the Bush administration has been all too willing to allow American oil companies to invest in a country that for years was off-limits for its role in bombing the Pan Am 103 passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the Labelle Disco in Berlin. Its strategy follows confirmation by the CIA in the fall that Mr. Gadhafi was unveiling the most secret recesses of his clandestine nuclear weapons program to British and American spies. This information has helped unravel the riddle of a global atomic black market involving Iran and North Korea.

The process of warming ties with Tripoli continues apace. This week a delegation from Libya’s foreign ministry is in Washington scoping out its old embassy and making plans to reopen an interest section in America’s capital. What happens to Mr. al-Jahmi will tell us a lot about how Mr. Gadhafi intends to operate in the future. If Mr. Gadhafi believes he can release his political prisoners, but then place them under house arrest or abduct them after they speak out, then how can we trust his word when he claims to permanently dismantle his nuclear and chemical weapons programs?