[Peace-discuss] Fw: The Hush-Hush Story: Why They Tortured

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Subject: The Hush-Hush Story: Why They Tortured


> The Hush-Hush Story: Why They Tortured 
> 
> Left Margin 
> By Carl Bloice 
> 
> BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
> 
> http://www.blackcommentator.com/322/322_lm_why_they_torture.html
> 
> It's like a can of worms from which a few are
> slithering out. Most of the major media have avoided
> even approaching it. But if it is as is being suggested
> the implications are enormous, touching not only on the
> real reason prisoners were tortured but, as well, into
> the real origin of the war in Iraq.
> 
> The US Senate Armed Services Committee report, issued
> April 21, on the interrogation techniques employed
> against detainees following the September 11 terrorist
> attack, wrote Pepe Escobar in the Asia Times, "reads
> like deja vu all over again: the US establishment under
> Bush was a replay of the Spanish Inquisition. And it
> all started even before a single 'high-profile al-Qaeda
> detainee' was captured. What Bush, vice president Dick
> Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and assorted
> little inquisitors wanted was above all to prove the
> non-existent link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and
> al-Qaeda, the better to justify a pre-emptive, illegal
> war planned by the now-defunct Project for the New
> American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s. The torture
> memos were just a cog in the imperial machine."
> 
> New York Times columnist Paul Krugman mentioned it in
> his column April 24, writing, "For the fact is that
> officials in the Bush administration instituted torture
> as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted
> to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt
> to extract 'confessions' that would justify that war.
> And during the march to war, most of the political and
> media establishment looked the other way." Krugman was
> more explicit in his blog, titled "Grand Unified
> Scandal" appearing the previous day, after the Senate
> report came out. "Let's say this slowly: the Bush
> administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to
> invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with
> 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the
> nonexistent link," he wrote. "There's a word for this:
> it's evil."
> 
> The impetus for the comment by Krugman and Escobar was
> a story carried April 21 in the McClatchy Newspapers by
> Jonathan S. Landay The story has made the rounds on the
> internet and in some of the foreign press but as of
> this writing has been ignored or obscured by most of
> the major U.S. media.
> 
> "The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on
> interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part
> to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and
> the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime,
> according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official
> and a former Army psychiatrist," wrote Landay. "Such
> information would've provided a foundation for one of
> former President George W. Bush's main arguments for
> invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever
> been found of operational ties between Osama bin
> Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
> 
> "The use of abusive interrogation - widely considered
> torture - as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to
> invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major
> report tracing the origin of the abuses and President
> Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S.
> officials for approving them."
> 
> Landay went on to quote "A former senior U.S.
> intelligence official familiar with the interrogation
> issue" saying former Vice President Dick Cheney and
> former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld 'demanded that
> the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq
> collaboration.'
> 
> "There were two reasons why these interrogations were
> so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,"
> Landay was told. "The main one is that everyone was
> worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after
> 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and
> Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the
> links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi
> exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them
> were there."
> 
> "There was constant pressure on the intelligence
> agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took
> to get that information out of the detainees,
> especially the few high-value ones we had, and when
> people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's
> and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," the informant
> continued. "Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told
> repeatedly, by CIA ... and by others, that there wasn't
> any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational
> ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such
> ties were likely because the two were fundamentally
> enemies, not allies."
> 
> Senior administration officials, however, "blew that
> off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something,
> that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough,
> that there had to be something more we could do to get
> that information," Landay was told.
> 
> The Senate report itself quoted a former U.S. Army
> psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, who told Army
> investigators three years ago that interrogators at the
> Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under
> "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida
> and Iraq.
> 
> "While we were there a large part of the time we were
> focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida
> and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a
> link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of
> the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people
> got in not being able to establish that link ... there
> was more and more pressure to resort to measures that
> might produce more immediate results."
> 
> Another newspaper that carried the story of the Senate
> report that included the Iraq connection was the
> Detroit News. Reporter Gordon Trowbridge wrote that
> "Administration officials repeatedly tried to link Iraq
> and al-Qaida in public statements as a potential
> justification for the war, but intelligence reviews
> have discredited the notion of significant links
> between the two. The accusation that senior officials
> chose to pursue interrogation tactics in pursuit of
> such information is likely to further anger opponents
> of the Iraq invasion and of harsh interrogation
> techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation,
> putting prisoners in stress positions for long periods
> of time or exposing them to extreme heat and cold or
> loud noises and music."
> 
> Trowbridge's report indicates that one of Cheney and
> Rumsfeld's "people" was none other than the latter's
> number two Paul Wolfowitz, a long time vociferous
> advocate of an attack in Iraq. He is said to have asked
> for regular updates on the interrogations.
> 
> "I think it's obvious that the administration was
> scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link
> (between al Qaida and Iraq)," said Senate Armed
> Services Committee, chair by Sen. Carl Levin, (D-Mi).
> "They made out links where they didn't exist."
> 
> "So now we know: Saddam made them do it," wrote Charley
> James, "The Progressive Curmudgeon, in the very
> informative and lively L.A. Progressive
> [http://tinyurl.com/dl96bn]. "The Levin report into
> Pentagon torture ... tore down the last false flag flying
> on the devil ship SS Torture, revealing that
> waterboarding and all the rest of the barbaric acts
> performed in our name on prisoners resulted from
> Cheney's frustration at not getting what he wanted:
> Someone to pin 9/11 on Saddam and 'fess up about how
> bin Laden was sleeping with The Tyrant of Baghdad."
> 
> "Reasonable people ought to be able to reach consensus
> on a few key points: Harsh interrogation methods should
> be used only as a last resort," says Clifford D. May,
> president of the rightwing Foundation for the Defense
> of Democracies (founded two days after September 11,
> and chair of the Policy hawkish Committee of the
> Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). "They should
> never be used for revenge, punishment or to force
> confessions." However, as James observes, it beginning
> to look like forcing a confession is exactly what the
> neo-conservative cabal in the White House and the
> Pentagon was up to.
> 
> Writing in The Guardian (UK) April 24, Matthew Duss
> drew attention to Rand Beers - a former NSC
> counterterrorism adviser who resigned over the war
> "which he correctly predicted would be disastrous for
> American security, and who was recently nominated for
> an under-secretary position at the Department of
> Homeland Security, concerning accused Al Qaeda
> operative Ibn al Sheikh Al-Libi who after being
> captured by the US in Afghanistan in late 2001, under
> torture - "evidence" of a tie between Al Qaeda and
> Iraq. As Beers recounted last year, 'Al-Libi's
> testimony was used by the Bush administration to
> substantiate its allegations that Iraq was prepared to
> provide al-Qaida with weapons of mass destruction.'
> However, Beers continued, 'in January 2004, al-Libi
> recanted his confession. He said that he had invented
> the information because he was afraid of being further
> abused by his interrogators. ... The administration's
> best case for the value of enhanced interrogation
> techniques, then, turned out to have been fundamentally
> flawed'."
> 
> "We now know that torture is inextricably tied to the
> Iraq war. Far from defusing "ticking time bombs",
> torture was employed by the Bush administration in
> order to generate information that would support their
> planned invasion of Iraq."
> 
> Notice the word "planned" here. The effort to extract
> evidence of a tie between September 11 and the
> government of Saddam Hussein began before the invasion
> was launched. It is obvious now that the attack was in
> the making before the attack on the World Trade Center
> and the Pentagon.
> 
> "But the torture of al Libi worked to sell the war in
> Iraq, providing the "evidence" that Secretary of State
> Colin Powell used when he spoke before the United
> Nations Security Council in February 2003," Steve
> Weissman wrote on truthout last Saturday. "I can trace
> the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how
> Iraq provided training in these [chemical and
> biological] weapons to al-Qaeda," Powell asserted.
> "Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he
> has told his story."
> 
> It now appears that then U.S. National Security Advisor
> and later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was the
> first official to give the go ahead for employing
> "enhanced interrogation techniques." Why her? And, why
> the hurry? She is declining comment now but maybe she
> could explain the strange statement she made at a press
> briefing in May 2002. "I don't think anybody could have
> predicted ... that they would try to use an airplane as
> a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," Rice said
> at a press briefing in May 2002. Actually the
> Administration was warned that something was afoot ad
> that it probably would involve airplanes. Was the
> surprise that it happened or the way that it happened
> and was the idea to blame whatever happened on Saddam
> Husain?
> 
> This week, former Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote in his
> blog, Daily Beast:
> 
> "Cheney's request for the declassification of material
> is a welcome development, but it should not be limited
> to his narrow request. Our country's understanding of
> what was done in our name by the Bush administration
> depends on the release, not just of the documents
> Cheney has designated, but of all documents related to
> the efforts of the Bush administration and Cheney
> himself to defend the indefensible-the decision to
> invade Iraq despite the knowledge at the time that Iraq
> did not have a nuclear program, had no ties to al
> Qaeda, and posed no existential threat to the United
> States or to its friends and allies in the region.
> 
> "The disinformation campaign to manipulate public
> opinion in favor of the invasion, the torture program,
> and the illegal exposure of a clandestine CIA agent-my
> wife, Valerie Plame Wilson - were linked events. In
> their desperate effort to gather material to whip up
> public support, Cheney and others resorted to torture,
> well known in the intelligence craft to elicit
> inherently unreliable information. Cheney & Co. then
> pressured the CIA to put its stamp of approval on a
> series of falsehoods-26 of which were inserted into
> Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech before the
> United Nations Security Council. At the same time,
> Cheney was furiously attempting to suppress the true
> information that Saddam Hussein was not seeking
> yellowcake uranium in Niger. After I published the
> facts in an article in The New York Times in July 2002,
> Cheney tried to punish me and discredit the truth by
> directing the outing of a CIA operative who happened to
> be my wife.
> 
> The suggestion that Bush Administration used torture in
> an effort to get a prisoner to back up their previously
> made claim that Iraq was linked to despicable 911
> terrorist attacks is reason enough to insist that there
> be a special commission to look into the matter. I
> suspect that much of the resistance to doing so flows
> from concern that question might arise about other
> things involved in the run-up to the war. Like, why
> were the plotters were so desperate to link 911 to
> Iraq? Could it be that some sort of attack on U.S. soil
> was anticipated and whatever happened, the finger would
> be pointed at Bagdad? A can of worms indeed.
> 
> BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice
> is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National
> Coordinating Committee of the Committees of
> Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly
> worked for a healthcare union. 
> 
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