Contrary to what some posters like to claim (that torture of Al Qaeda prisoners averted a dangerous attack on an American city), it now appears that torture was used to gain false intelligence linking Iraq to 9/11. Posters in another terb thread (https://terb.cc/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=234901) claimed that the US must have been getting useful and reliable intelligence from “enhanced interrogation techniques” or there would be no point to doing it. But the truth is now coming out that their hope was to force those being tortured to “say what they wanted to hear”, in other words, to say anything that might end the torture. Sadly, this appears to be the same motive of the North Vietnamese when they were torturing American prisoners of war.
This all comes from the Senate Armed Services Committee and is endorsed by all its members, including Liberal Left Loonies John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman.
The third to last paragraph of this New York Times Op Ed comes to a damning conclusion:
Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our
government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also
must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere,
if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an
unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11,"
torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that
fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do
with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which
flows much of the Bush White House`s illegality.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/opinion/26rich.html?th&emc=th
New York Times April 25, 2009
op-Ed
The Banality of Bush White House Evil
"President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this
grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won`t vanish into a memory hole
any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai."
By FRANK RICH
WE don`t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now
may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks
from a "Trench Coat Mafia," or, as ABC News maintained at the time, "part of
a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement." In
the new best seller "Columbine," the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who
worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among
their classmates.
On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the
photographs from Abu Ghraib on "60 Minutes II." Here, too, we want to cling
to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely
it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario
out of "24." If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by
President Bush as "a few American troops who dishonored our country and
disregarded our values": promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie
England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while
the top command got a pass.
We`ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five
years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books,
for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: "By no later
than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic
narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government
decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it." When the Obama
administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in
part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.
Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that
torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government`s highest
levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to "24";
that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in
inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the
F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist
attacks.
The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were
not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo,
Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale,
Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe
law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.
Judge Bybee`s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a
Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He
currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As
an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo
endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation "techniques" like
"facial slap (insult slap)" and "insects placed in a confinement box."
He proposed using 10 such techniques "in some sort of escalating fashion,
culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this
technique." Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the
Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes
trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it "does not, in our
view, inflict `severe pain or suffering.` "
Still, it`s not Bybee`s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that
make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because
it actually does add something new - and, even after all we`ve heard,
something shocking - to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in
full context, it`s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths
and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our
history.
Bybee`s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had
been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is
portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one
of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron
Suskind reported in his book "The One Percent Doctrine," Zubaydah was
identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of
the F.B.I.`s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as
the terrorist group`s flight booker and "greeter," like "Joe Louis in the
lobby of Caesar`s Palace." Zubaydah "knew very little about real operations,
or strategy." He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.
By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I.
and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His
most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11
mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book "The Dark Side," even that
contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the
C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any
event, as one of Zubaydah`s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a
Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had
worked. Yet Bybee`s memo purported that an "increased pressure phase" was
required to force Zubaydah to talk.
As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was
waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the
newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant
intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So
why the overkill? Bybee`s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: "There is
currently a level of `chatter` equal to that which preceded the September 11
attacks."
We don`t know if there was such unusual "chatter" then, but it`s unlikely
Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts
may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade
to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration
interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative
explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to
the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees
released last week.
The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist
assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army
investigators of another White House imperative: "A large part of the time
we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and
we were not being successful." As higher-ups got more "frustrated" at the
inability to prove this connection, the major said, "there was more and more
pressure to resort to measures" that might produce that intelligence.
(con`t)
This all comes from the Senate Armed Services Committee and is endorsed by all its members, including Liberal Left Loonies John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman.
The third to last paragraph of this New York Times Op Ed comes to a damning conclusion:
Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our
government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also
must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere,
if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an
unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11,"
torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that
fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do
with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which
flows much of the Bush White House`s illegality.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/opinion/26rich.html?th&emc=th
New York Times April 25, 2009
op-Ed
The Banality of Bush White House Evil
"President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this
grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won`t vanish into a memory hole
any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai."
By FRANK RICH
WE don`t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now
may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks
from a "Trench Coat Mafia," or, as ABC News maintained at the time, "part of
a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement." In
the new best seller "Columbine," the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who
worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among
their classmates.
On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the
photographs from Abu Ghraib on "60 Minutes II." Here, too, we want to cling
to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely
it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario
out of "24." If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by
President Bush as "a few American troops who dishonored our country and
disregarded our values": promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie
England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while
the top command got a pass.
We`ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five
years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books,
for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: "By no later
than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic
narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government
decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it." When the Obama
administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in
part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.
Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that
torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government`s highest
levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to "24";
that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in
inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the
F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist
attacks.
The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were
not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo,
Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale,
Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe
law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.
Judge Bybee`s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a
Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He
currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As
an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo
endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation "techniques" like
"facial slap (insult slap)" and "insects placed in a confinement box."
He proposed using 10 such techniques "in some sort of escalating fashion,
culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this
technique." Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the
Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes
trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it "does not, in our
view, inflict `severe pain or suffering.` "
Still, it`s not Bybee`s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that
make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because
it actually does add something new - and, even after all we`ve heard,
something shocking - to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in
full context, it`s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths
and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our
history.
Bybee`s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had
been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is
portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one
of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron
Suskind reported in his book "The One Percent Doctrine," Zubaydah was
identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of
the F.B.I.`s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as
the terrorist group`s flight booker and "greeter," like "Joe Louis in the
lobby of Caesar`s Palace." Zubaydah "knew very little about real operations,
or strategy." He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.
By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I.
and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His
most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11
mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book "The Dark Side," even that
contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the
C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any
event, as one of Zubaydah`s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a
Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had
worked. Yet Bybee`s memo purported that an "increased pressure phase" was
required to force Zubaydah to talk.
As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was
waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the
newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant
intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So
why the overkill? Bybee`s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: "There is
currently a level of `chatter` equal to that which preceded the September 11
attacks."
We don`t know if there was such unusual "chatter" then, but it`s unlikely
Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts
may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade
to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration
interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative
explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to
the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees
released last week.
The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist
assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army
investigators of another White House imperative: "A large part of the time
we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and
we were not being successful." As higher-ups got more "frustrated" at the
inability to prove this connection, the major said, "there was more and more
pressure to resort to measures" that might produce that intelligence.
(con`t)
