Finding bin Laden - Torture failed but people with a dogmatic mindset still want it used.

Steve Benen has brought together several excellent sources who each clearly disprove the effort by Republicans to claim that the Bush-authorized torture (euphemism - "enhanced interrogation") got the information that led to Sunday's successful raid on bin Laden's Pakistani compound.

Donald Rumsfeld, of all people, threw cold water on the new talking point yesterday, noting that Bush-era torture policies weren't responsible for obtaining the information.

The Associated Press further set the record straight, reporting, "Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation."

Brian Beutler added, "Thus, a big chunk of the rationale for giving the Bush credit for bin Laden's death falls apart. It took officials until Obama's presidency to locate this courier, and well into Obama's second year in office before they found the compound. Only then was the raid itself designed and, on Sunday, implemented."

Joan McCarter has more on this, offering an even more detailed debunking of the argument.

I especially like the fact that Donald Rumsfeld is one of the people stating that torture did not work. My opinion of him increases a little.

I have been trying to understand why the conservatives and fundamentalists as groups are so dead set that torture is the only way to get good information from their worst and presumably most evil enemies. My conclusion is that members of those groups suffer from a dogmatic mindset. They are so certain they are correct that they refuse to listen to facts or objections. Anyone who opposes what they "know" to be true must be evil and plotting to thwart them.

The only reason I can recognize for someone to torture someone else to get information (other than pure sadism) is because the victim of torture is not saying what the torturer wants to hear. The torturers have a dogmatic mindset which refuses to accept that they, the torturers, might be somehow wrong. It is impossible for the dogmatic individuals to consider themselves wrong, so being wrong is not a part of their decision process. Since the torturers cannot be wrong the victims must be. The victims "must" have another, malicious or evil, intent to thwart the actions of the torturers since they cannot be right and contradict the torturers.

"Knowing" that you are right and assuming the victim is saying otherwise simply to thwart the torturer for some presumed malicious purpose of their own (an evil person, in other words.) justifies extreme measures of all kinds to get the recalcitrant evil people to comply. Only facts can prevent such extremism and by definition a dogmatic person rejects contrary facts.

It all comes back to a dogmatic mindset which is very characteristic of fundamentalists (usually religious but includes many libertarians), members of the wealthy social classes who fear losing their wealth because the lower classes take it from them, and conservatives (usually older) who do not want to see the old social order changed.

Waldman asks the right questions about Cheney's torture efforts

David Waldman properly describes the torture effort directed by Dick Cheney. This is based on the recent revelations from McClatchy News and from Lawrence Wilkerson.




We now know that the so-called "ticking time-bomb" scenario did not occur. What did occur is that Dick Cheney used his position as Vice President to direct the invasion of Iraq, a nation which was no real threat to the U.S. and which had no capability to threaten the U.S. Cheney's real reasons for directing the invasion of Iraq are not known, unless perhaps it was a symptom of his paranoia.

Cheney could do this because he was the Vice President in a White House in which the person occupying the office of President permitted him to run anything he wanted in the federal government without oversight. He collected many of his acolytes onto the White House staff and ran the White House Iraq Group, pushing the propaganda effort that worked to justify the invasion of Iraq.

It is well known that Bush had no knowledge of national security matters and deferred to Cheney's widely acknowledged greater expertise. Bush himself concealed his lack of knowledge of government operations and his total lack of interest in them behind a wall of supposedly setting goals and then delegating their achievement to subordinates. Apparently no one ever got it through to him as he was handed his Harvard MBA (based on who is father was) that the manager who delegates in that manner has to set goals and hold the subordinates to their achievement with close oversight. Bush certainly never did that. He let Cheney run wild. For that failure, Bush is a failed President.

But for his successful efforts to invade an non-threatening country and then to try to direct the torture of prisoners to obtain confessions to justify that illegal invasion, Dick Cheney is a war criminal.

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Addendum 10:45am
How do we know that the torture was used to justify the war crime after the fact? Dick Cheney knows or should know the truth about torture, which Bob Cesca states very clearly:

"According to multiple accounts and experts, the efficacy of torture is limited to ascertaining what the torturer wants to hear -- rather than information that's actually true. "

Given that fact, the only possible reason for torturing prisoners is to obtain false confessions to justify the idiocy of invading Iraq when the real enemy was al Qaeda, an enemy of Saddam Hussein.

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Addendum II 12:45 pm
Batocchio has written an extremely good analysis of the torture situation and provides links to many good resources.

Re: Pelosi torture briefing - so what?

There's been a lot of talk, primarily by right-wingers who want to defend their support of the use of torture on captives, that then minority leader Nancy Pelosi was somehow briefed that the CIA was using maybe planned to use enhanced questioning techniques to get Intelligence about terrorists and proposed terrorism acts.

Vicki Divoll [*], in an OpEd published in the New York Times, points out that there is no legally constituted body called "The Gang of Four" to begin with. Even assuming that the CIA did actually honestly brief Rep. Pelosi about the proposed use of waterboarding (it's not at all certain that they did) she was restricted from telling any of her colleagues about it. What was she supposed to do with the information if it was actually given to her?

The Constitution gives "...aggregate, not individual, powers to the legislative branch." The minority leader is relatively powerless in the first place. With the restrictions placed on communicating any information actually provided to any other member of Congress, there was nothing she could have done.

I'd also point out that there is no way of showing that the CIA actually told her anything. The so-called memo does not have any credibility since the CIA does not present the person who wrote it and placed it in the files. That could easily have been done last week, and with the CIA very invested in deflecting blame from themselves and also with the CIA populated by people whose normal job description includes large measures lying to the various publics to manipulate political responses, they are innately under suspicion. The fact that Sen. Mel Martinez also says he was not briefed on the use of actual torture techniques adds credibility to Rep. Nancy Pelosi's denial that she was briefed.

But the while the fact that Nancy Pelosi was briefed in a timely manner on the use of torture techniques by the CIA is very much in doubt, that doesn't matter. With the restrictions on her communication to other in Congress even if she was briefed, there was nothing she had any power to do with the information. The whole issue is right-wing deflection of blame from anyone who actually is responsible to someone else who could not have been responsible.

The real question is whether there was a crime committed (almost certain) and if so, who might be prosecuted for such a crime (less certain.)

A second and perhaps even more important question, as become whether Dick Cheney and his evil twin, David Addington, were actually attempting to justify the then proposed invasion of Iraq by torturing false confessions that purported to prove a link between Sadaam Hussein and al Qaeda. It is now well-known that torture does not elicit useful Intelligence. It instead forces the victim of torture to say whatever the torturer wants to hear just to make the torture stop. So while torture is effectively useless as an Intelligence-gathering tool, it is excellent for creating false confessions that can be used to justify actions the torturer wants the public to support.

It now appears that Dick Cheney's defense of torture as a way of gathering Intelligence is actually a cover-up of his office's pressure to torture confessions that justified Cheney's belief that Sadaam was allied with al Qaeda and had nuclear weapons. That makes the torture of prisoners at his clear direction the equivalent of the discredited "Italian Letter" that purported to show that Iraq was getting Yellow cake unranium to build nukes. In fact, the next question that should be revived was whether Ahmed Chalibi was the point-man who the Iranians used to run a highly successful Intelligence scam on Dick Cheney and his right-wing allies like the columnists/propagandists Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer.

Compared to all these real questions, the idea that because Nancy Pelosi might have been briefed on the CIA's use of torture techniques is nothing more than an irrelevant distraction. It is pure right-wing propaganda designed and pushed to prevent the real criminals from being identified and punished.

[*] Vicki Divoli is former CIA CTC deputy general counsel. She knows what she is talking about.

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Laura Rozen has a very good analysis of all the events that have led to the current attacks on Nancy Pelosi and to her spirited pushback. The entire briefing process and its misuse and the lies apparently told by the CIA go back to the office of the Vice President and Dick Cheney.

Wilkerson shoots down Cheney's lies

Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson was listening as Dick Cheney shot off his mouth lying about how successful the Cheney-Bush administration was in protecting American lives during seven-and-on-half years after they stupidly allowed the 9-11 terrorists to kill over 3000 Americans. So Col. Wilkerson has written his response. Here it is, along with a short video of Cheney's on-TV statement which prompted it.

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Addendum 5/15/2009 8:48pm
Joe Conason writes about how torture was used to justify the war in Iraq. It was not used to warn of upcoming terrorist activities. I was used to invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.

Obama is right to be reluctant to investigate Bush admin officials and the torture issue

I am a strong proponent of the Rule of Law as a basic element of the American nation, since without the Rule of Law the Constitution itself, the basis of all American law, is nothing by a fanciful piece of fiction. So I strongly support investigation of the high government officials and prosecution when necessary. No one is above the law. Ever. That is an absolute necessity in America if America is to continue to exist as a democratic form of nation.

That said, Harry Truman considered the need for national health care to be critical back in 1948. It was seriously discussed when Social Security was passed in the 30's. It's been two generations now, and the need has only gotten much worse in the intervening years of conservative obstruction and delay. I also see what appears to me to be a concerted effort by Obama and his administration to clear the decks of anything and everything that would interfere with passing universal national health care in some form this year.

Obama is gathering allies and neutralizing opponents at every step of his administration, and I'd guess that even includes the sacrifice of some things he otherwise considers very, very important. To me that appears a likely explanation for many of the decisions, actions and statements that Obama has been making which have infuriated Progressives. One of those items is, I think, Obama's reluctance to be seen supporting investigation and the potential prosecution of Bush/Cheney officials for their crimes in office. I think that every action, decision and statement out of the Obama administration has to be considered in the light of the question of how it will effect Obama's effort to pass universal health care by October of this year.

My guess is that the Obama effort to avoid a divisive battle over investigating and possible prosecution of Bush/Cheney administration officials is one of the otherwise extremely important things that is being sacrificed to get the health care bill passed. Any such prosecutions will unavoidably be highly divisive and will completely consume the media, sucking wind out of the health care issue. Prosecutions of ex-government officials is "sexy" and easy reporting to the media, just as dead blond girls or the J.R. murder trial are. Health care legislation is not similarly easy to cover. Obama has a unique opportunity to pass health care at long last, and the investigation/prosecution issue threatens that greatly.

That's the kind of balancing act that Presidents must perform. There are two absolutely critical issues that have to be dealt with, and to deal with either means sacrificing the other. If I'm right, then Obama's choice of putting all his effort into the health care fight is, I'd say, the correct decision. Not one I like and not a pretty choice, but certainly the one that I think needs to be made for the long term good of America.

Five top administration Lawyers wrote the Bush/Cheney rules on torture

Alberto Gonzales - former White House Council.
David Addington - legal adviser and now chief of staff to Cheney.
William J. Haynes II - former Pentagon general counsel.
John Yoo - former Justice Department Lawyer.
Timothy E. Flanigan - former deputy to Alberto Gonzales.

What do these men have in common? From the McClatchy news article:

WASHINGTON — The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials. [Snip]

The quintet of lawyers, who called themselves the “War Council," drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military's code of justice, the federal court system and America's international treaties in order to prevent anyone — from soldiers on the ground to the president — from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes.

These five men, following orders and guidance from George Bush and Dick Cheney, allowed and encouraged individuals from being held accountable for what otherwise would be considered war crimes. It seems only right and fair that they, themselves, should be held directly and criminally accountable for those crimes.

Here is the Organized system of torture, carefully documented, that the bush adminisration designed.

Think that too much has been made of torture techniques being occasionally used by people directed by the Bush leaders? Take a look at this systematic set of torture techniques which the Bush administration has designed. This system is the one the FBI agents at Guantanamo refused to participate with. Tell me if this looks like a few aberrant individuals or it looks like what it is - a well-thought-out torture system designed and implemented by the very top leaders of the Bush administration.

Go look here.

This is a clear violation of the international laws of human rights. Bush has said he knew and approved of this stuff, and it was clearly being coordinated out of the White House. That makes Bush no better than the worst of the Communists, the Nazis, or such obvious other right wing war criminals as Pinochet or the Argentine Generals.

John Yoo, responsibility for torture, and the Bush legacy

Recently the media took notice again of the torture that most Americans first became aware of from the Abu Ghraib pictures. We then learned that the “interrogation” techniques that were used there had migrated from Guantanamo with the approval of the entire U.S. military command structure right up to at least Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld. Most recently we have actually seen the memo that rogue conservative attorney John Yoo wrote justifying the use of “harsh interrogation techniques” that the rest of the world consider to be violations of human rights.

There are several things to consider, of which I want to address two today. One is whether the attorney who wrote legal opinions justifying the use of torture, John Yoo, is as much of a war criminal as are Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and others. Another is why the Bush administration has been so insistent about using torture in the first place.

Philippe Sands, who wrote the excellent Vanity Fair article The Green Light which described how the Bush administration directly authorized the torture of one particular prisoner at Guantanamo, recently also wrote the following:

In our system of government, lawyers play a crucial role, as gatekeepers of legality and constitutionality. When the lawyers bend, when they fail to exercise independent and professional judgment, and when they become handmaidens to policymakers, they cross a line that raises the possibility of ethics violations and possibly even criminal violations. In “Torture Team,” I describe a conversation I had with a European judge and a European prosecutor. I was told that, under their rules of criminal law, “the lawyer has the same responsibility as the interrogator,” and that, when it comes to torture authorized by a lawyer, “the lawyer who gives such legal advice is not [treated] as an accomplice, it is as though he is the author the act.” Whatever the moralities of the situation, and however much one might agree that the principal responsibility lies with the politicians who ultimately made the decisions—the secretary of defense, the vice president, and the president—the responsibility of the senior lawyers is also there. Dean Edley’s point sits uncomfortably with the underlying rationale of the 1947 judgment in United States v Altstoetter and others.

A few days later, ABC ran a story confirming the direct involvement of the most senior members of the Bush Administration in approving certain decisions on individual interrogation techniques. This was an issue I discussed with Major General Mike Dunlavey. “The Green Light” contains the following exchange:

How high up did [the decision on new tactics] go?, I asked Dunlavey.
‘It must have been all the way to the White House,’ he replied.

On April 9, ABC News reported, in relation to C.I.A. interrogations, that “the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al-Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency.” The dates are not specified.

Two days later, on April 11, President Bush confirmed the account. “Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people”, he told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. “And yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

These important developments provide important confirmation of the thrust of my piece: that the law was circumvented, that key decisions were made at the top, that the bottom-up theory is false, and that individuals like Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate at Guantánamo, were scapegoated. The disappearance of a plausible bottom-up narrative also adds ballast to the evidence showing that the Guantánamo techniques migrated to Iraq and informed events at Abu Ghraib.

Back in early 2006 I wrote about how obvious it was that the responsibility for Abu Ghraib went very high in the military chain of command. The regular military officers carefully courts-martialed low-level individuals, preferably Reservists, as scapegoats to protect those who either directed or intentionally ignored the torture that was occurring in Abu Ghraib. Although the possibility that the White House (Bush and staff) was directly involved wasn’t as obvious then it is now clear that they were not only involved but were actively directing the very techniques used on specific prisoners in many instances.

It has also recently become clear is that just as Bush and Cheney were damned and determined to invade Iraq from day one of the Bush administration, similarly they intended to use torture to interrogate enemies from early on. Did they feel that information they needed was being hidden from them behind the (in their view unreasonable) international human rights laws? Did they feel that they had a unique and justifiable right to violate those international human rights laws? If so, then they were clearly not the first. Most iconically in the twentieth century the interrogators and their bosses in the German Gestapo felt that way, but so did others. As I wrote in May 2007 there is a long history of this kind of thinking. there is a long history of this kind of thinking by military occupiers in foreign lands.

There is an excellent history book called A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954 - 1962 by Alistair Horne which presents the history of the war of national liberation by the Algerian FLN to defeat the French Imperial occupiers. He has several Prefaces, each written for a later edition as he got further information about the Algerian war of national liberation. Just reading them is a real education.

The FLN learned a lot from Ho Chi Minh in Viet Nam, and applied it to their war against the French, since both nations had the same intent - remove the Imperialist occupier. The French kept fighting and kept wondering why the Algerians were fighting them because the French were just there to bring democracy and improve the education and economy of Algeria. The FLN realized early on that they could not defeat the French militarily in a head-to-head battle, so they developed terrorist techniques and went after the Algerian police who were attempting to stabilize Algeria.

The French recognized that they were fighting a war that required effective Intelligence to win, so they made special efforts to gather that Intelligence, using some of the nastiest torture techniques that they had developed. The Algerians responded by increased terrorism that went after civilians, men women and children with no regard for humanity.

Any of this sound familiar? Because after the French left Algeria the Palestinians used techniques developed by the Algerians to go after the Israeli occupiers during the Intifada, and the Israelis used increasingly tough interrogation techniques on the Palestinians to get effective Intelligence in a timely manner. All of this has blended into the current war in Iraq, with the two sides, American and insurgent, each patterning on the appropriate techniques for occupier and occupied developed earlier in Algeria.

Horne presents evidence that shows there is no difference between the rationale and rhetoric of the earlier Imperialist occupiers and the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza as well as the U.S. in Iraq. The reason our military is fighting terrorists in Iraq is exactly that same as why the French were fighting the Viet Cong in Viet Nam and then later were fighting the terrorists in Algeria. The French were occupiers who did not want to leave and the Occupied wanted them out at any cost. That is similar to Bush's recent statement about there being an American presence in Iraq for the next half century, on a time scale similar to that of our troops in South Korea. That will not happen. We will leave Iraq relatively soon. The cost of staying is way too high.

America is an unwanted occupier in Iraq, and now we even have polls showing that the majority of Iraqis want us out of there immediately if not sooner.

But there is one more really significant similarity. Torture. The U.S. under George W. Bush demands good and timely Intelligence, and they will go to whatever extremes they need to get it. That is the reason for the similarities in the language describing Intelligence gathering techniques that this article started with. [The Nazis also called torture ‘Enhanced Interrogation techniques’, just as the Bush administration does.] But here is Alastair Horne's warning on the use of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques:"

[ from page 18.]

The vile hand of torture; of abuse, and counter-abuse. In the Algerian War what led -- probably more than any other single factor -- to the ultimate defeat of France was the realization, in France and the world at large, that methods of interrogation sere being used that had been condemned under the Nazi Occupation. At the dawn of the new century, the ugly ghosts of torture returned to plague France. In 2001, and eighty-three-year-old former general, Paul Aussaresses, published a book in which he unashamedly, indeed proudly, admitted to having tortured -- in a good cause, he claimed. After a trial which gripped France, the aging General got away with a fine of one hundred thousand franc, on a uniquely worded charge "in the name of respect for the victims."

Because of the slowness of communications in the 1950's and 1960's it took a year or more for the message of abuses perpetuated in Algeria to sink in. Now, with the Internet and al-Jazeera, one set of photos from Abu Ghraib is enough to inflame hatred across the Islamic world against the West, providing an excuse for all the beheadings and atrocities carried out by al-Qaeda. From the Inquisition to the Gestapo and the "Battle of Algiers," history teaches us that, in the production of reliable intelligence, regardless of the moral issue, torture is counter-productive. As a further footnote to my tenet, learned in Algeria, ... torture should never, never, never be resorted to by any Western society.

The testimony of Prefect Tietgen of Algiers - Tietgen had been informed by the Algiers police that they had intelligence of a bomb which could have caused appalling casualties. Could they put a suspect to "the question"? Himself a deportee in World War II, Teitgen ... refused.

...I trembled the whole afternoon. Finally the bomb did not go off. Thank God I was right. Because once you get into the torture business, your lost.... All our so-called civilization is covered with varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find fear....When you wee the throats of your coplains slit, the varnish disappears."

In America under the heel of Bush, Cheney and the Congressional Conservative Republicans, the varnish is similarly gone.

If Imperialism is defined as “The policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations” it is hard to avoid recognizing that America is acting imperially as an occupying nation in Iraq. America is the occupier in Iraq just as France was also the occupier acting imperially in both Vietnam and in Algeria. The Palestinians clearly identified the Israelis as imperialist occupiers in the West Bank and adopted the same guerrilla techniques of resistance in the Intifada.

Whether the occupying nations in each case recognized their behavior as imperialism is unimportant. The occupied nations (and Palestine) recognized it, and all have used similar methods to force the occupiers out. As one reaction, the occupying nations each, in their fury at being resisted, have applied extreme “enhanced interrogation techniques” just as the Nazis did in WW II.

The public evidence from abu Ghraib is clear now. Abu Ghraib was not the actions of a few, low-level rogue individuals. Abu Ghraib was directed and controlled by the military chain of command all the way up to and including the White House and was approved by George Bush. The torture, or “enhanced interrogation techniques,” were an application of force in common with other occupying armies in the twentieth, including the Germans in France, the French in Vietnam and Algeria, and the Israelis in the West Bank, and in each instance were a direct result of an attempt to use the military to quell resistance to the occupation of a foreign land. It should also be noted that in each case when the occupiers finally did leave the occupied territory, the battle ceased. The "terrorists" DID NOT follow the occupiers home. Which brings us to the question of personal responsibility for the criminal behavior in Iraq.

John Yoo’s memo approving the torture techniques went over the line of merely legally unethical to the point that Yoo himself has become criminally responsible for the violations of international human rights laws that he wrote to justify. Yoo is directly complicit in the crimes committed by the Bush administration, not as an attorney who merely provided legal advice but as a direct participant who did his best to bend the law to the point of breaking to justify that which is clearly criminal. Yoo’s legacy will be joined with that of George Bush, Dick Chaney, Don Rumsfeld and a cast of thousands of other willing criminals.

As for Bush’s legacy, George Bush has famously said that in spite of his deep unpopularity at present, history will revise the evaluation and he will be seen in a much better light by future historians. Perhaps his God has told him so. If so, Bush's God lied.

Since Bush is directly responsible for the invasion of a foreign nation even less justified than the Mexican-American War and for criminally unleashing and directing the same interrogation techniques universally condemned when practiced by the Gestapo and the French, it seems highly unlikely that Bush’s approval by future historians will even reach the extremely low levels of the American President previously considered to be the worst America has ever had, Andrew Johnson. There are similarities between the two presidencies.

Both Andrew Johnson and George Bush have attempted to rule in opposition to the Congress after Congress became cognizant of the disaster that the President was directing. I find it interesting that in Andrew Johnson’s battles with Congress he is described as “Obstinate rather than firm it undoubtedly seemed to him that following counsel and making concessions were a display of weakness.” Sounds a lot like Bush 43.

It is unfortunate that the Democratic leadership of Congress did not see fit to impeach Bush and Cheney. Perhaps the Democratic leadership of Congress felt that they themselves were too complicit in Bush's crimes to pass judgment on him?

It wasn't the publication of the photos, Lynndie. It was what you guys did.

The newspaper this morning published an AP article in which Lynndie England, famous for being in some of the photos out of abu Ghraib, tells the German Stern Magazine that publication of those photos fueled to insurgency.

In an interview with the weekly magazine Stern posted on its Web site Tuesday, England was both remorseful and unrepentant -- and conceded that the published photos surely incensed insurgents in Iraq.

"I guess after the picture came out the insurgency picked up and Iraqis attacked the Americans and the British and they attacked in return and they were just killing each other. I felt bad about it ... no, I felt pissed off. If the media hadn't exposed the pictures to that extent, then thousands of lives would have been saved," she was quoted as saying.

Asked how she could blame the media for the controversy, she said she wasn't the one who leaked the photos.

"Yeah, I took the photos, but I didn't make it worldwide. Yes, I was in five or six pictures and I took some pictures, and those pictures were shameful and degrading to the Iraqis and to our government," she said, according to the report.

So she is blaming the publication of the photos for the insurgency.

Sorry, Lynndie. It was what you did in abu Ghraib that fueled the insurgency. The photos may have made the events more graphic, but every prison visitor knew what was happening there, and every person released from abu Ghraib told Iraqis what the Americans were doing. It wasn't the photos. It was what you did to people - Iraqis - in there that fueled the insurgency.

That said, Lynndie would not have done what she did had her command structure not failed her. Her commanders, all the way up to George Bush, set the tone for what was done there. He continues to set that same tone when he recently vetoed the law against the CIA using torture.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld are all directly responsible for fueling the insurgency in Iraq, and they left Lynndie England and her fellow enlisted soldiers to take the rap for what the tone that set and the actions they directed. England and her fellow enlisted soldiers were shamefully used by the entire American chain of command as scapegoats for the actions that were taken at the direction of the highest levels of command.

She has every right to be angry, but those who published the photos are not the proper people to be angry at. They showed the American message given to the Iraqis, but they only published it. They were not responsible for creating that message.

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I am also fully aware that what really was said or really happened and what is reported in the media to have been said or to have happened are usually two very different things. Reporters, like Nedra Pickler of the AP, frequently have their own axe to grind. (I am not familiar with Matt Moore's reputation.)

I would not be at all surprised to find that those who published this story similarly had a complaint about the publication of the abu Ghraib pictures but support the invasion of Iraq. I also recall reports that Lynndie England was rejected from the regular army because she was not up to the intelligence standards, but she got into the Reserves on a waiver. So I don't expect her to have the understanding of the larger picture.

More likely than not, she is again being used by someone else to present a message. The Associated Press is not especially reliable, and a report based on the German magazine "Der Stern" ("The Star") does not fill me with a lot of trust. Unsurprising, but again a damned shame for Lynndie. She is once again very probably a pawn being viciously used by others.

Congress had approved torture for interrogation

Laura Rozen points out that although Congress has been quick to have hearings on the destruction of the interrogation-by-torture tapes in Thailand, the focus has been on the destruction of the tapes, not what was on them. Why?

Because Congress knew that torture was being used to interrogate prisoners, and approved of it. They're as guilty as the the Bush administration. Investigating torture would mean that Congress would have to investigate itself as well as the Republican administration.

That's sick. Our government, in its entirety, has abandoned American principles. The Republicans led the way, but the Democrats have gone quietly along with the crowd.

The torture tapes: a history

Credit where credit is due. The Washington Post has a good article (informative and plausible) explaining why the torture tapes were made and what happened to them.

Worth reading.

CIA, FBI battle over questioning of Zubaydah

I only just stumbled on this article in "Radar" by Charles Kaiser. Essentially he describes the ABC news story by Brian Ross on the effectiveness of waterboarding Zubaydah as a single-source crock, presenting the views of ex-CIA man John Kiriakou who wasn't even a witness to the events.

Kaiser refers back to the Story published in Vanity Fair last July by Katherine Eban which rather fully described the capture and questioning of Zubaydah, and points out that it contradicts Brian Ross' story on ABC at every turn. But for some odd reason, the ABC story never mentions the prior Vanity Fair story.

From Charles Kaiser at RADAR:

It turns out that ABC's amiable source is at the center of an all-out war between the CIA and the FBI over which agency actually got the terrorist Abu Zubaydah to talk—and whether or not any of the CIA's coercive techniques were useful, or totally counterproductive. But Brian Ross never mentioned that. Here are some of the discrepancies between the ABC and the Vanity Fair versions:

• The FBI says that after Zubaydah was shot during the effort to capture him, he was stabilized at the nearest hospital. There, the FBI questioned him, using its typical rapport-building techniques. An FBI agent showed him photographs of suspected al Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that "Moktar," or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then laid out the details of the plot. According to Eban, "America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely"—exactly the opposite of what ABC reported.


• ABC's CIA man says he was the first person to speak to Zubaydah when he came out of his coma, and he learned nothing useful from him before he was waterboarded. The FBI says no CIA man was present when Zubaydah first started to talk.


• Vanity Fair says Zubaydah's cooperation actually evaporated "with the arrival of the CIA's interrogation team."


• According to Eban, after Zubaydah clammed up, the CIA was left to conclude that Zubaydah would talk only when he had been reduced to complete helplessness and dependence.

Kaiser also points to the Washington Post article by Walther Pincus and Dan Eggen that lays out the facts of the capture and interrogation of Zubaydah.

It looks like the real story is that ABC and Brian Ross either screwed up badly, or were used by the CIA in a public disagreement with the FBI, or ABC and Brian Ross have other reasons to publish pure disinformation as fact. The ABC report reports as fact things that no one else does, and they do not appear to have any confirmation.

Of course, the CIA kept videotapes of the entire interrogation, so we can learn which it the truth very easily. Except, of course, the CIA and much of the Bush administration concealed those tapes until they convinced someone in the CIA to destroy them. But now, even if someone who is aware of what was on those tapes tells his story, it is still just "he said; he said" with no likely confirmation possible.

Can you spell "Obstruction of Justice?"

The destroyed torture tapes

Larry Johnson has posted an article that describes the timeline of the torture tapes that everyone is currently concerned with. Larry bases his article on interviews with CIA people he knows, with an excerpt from The One Percent Doctrine and his own experience with the CIA.

The tapes were made when Abu Zubaydah, captured in Pakistan in March 2002, was interrogated by the CIA in Thailand. I haven't learned why the tapes were made, nor does Larry address this. But

George Bush is briefed regularly by George Tenet on the details of Zubaydah’s interrogation (see p. 22, State of War by James Risen). Cofer Black is in charge of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and oversees the CIA’s hunt for the terrorists. Zubaydah is interrogated in Thailand, where the sessions were filmed. He was waterboarded sometime in the May-June 2002 time frame. Enhanced interrogation methods were used and approval for them came from Jim Pavitt (see p. 21 of ABC News interview of former CIA case officer, John Kiriakou). Pavitt was the DDO (i.e., Deputy Director of Operations). Stephen Kappes, who currently serves as the Deputy Director of the CIA, was named Assistant Deputy Director of Operations in June 2002. Ron Suskind confirms Risen’s report that the President and his National Security team were regularly briefed on the results of Zubaydah’s torture sessions (see The One Percent Doctrine, pp. 111-115).

What we know for certain is that the CIA was keeping the President and his National Security team fully briefed on the methods and results of interrogating Abu Zubaydah. In fact, it is highly likely that George Tenet showed part of the videotape of the interrogation to the President.

From then until June 2005 there were several times that the CIA was asked about tapes of interrogations and answered that it did not make such tapes. (See Larry's article for details.) But then

late June 2005–An Italian judge issued arrest warrants for 13 U.S. CIA agents accused of kidnapping imam Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in Italy in 2003, and sending him to Egypt for questioning regarding possible terrorist activities.

14 November 2005–In response to an order of the U.S. District Court for the C.I.A. to confirm or deny that it has video or audio tapes of interrogations of C.I.A. subjects, the C.I.A. the “U.S. Government does not have any video or audio tapes of the interrogations of (two terrorist suspects whose names are blacked out)” (see p. 4 of U.S. Attorney letter)

Larry says that this event apparently triggered the destruction of the tapes. Apparently Jose Rodriguez, then Deputy Director of Operations, checked with both the CIA Inspector General and the Directorate of Operation’s assigned Assistant General Counsel before destroying the DO’s copies of the tapes. Larry emphasizes that Jose is a lawyer and can be expected to have records of who he spoke to.

There's more detail in the article. It's worth a read.

Color me cynical, but I have no doubt at all that Bush and everyone in the chain of command up to him were completely aware of what was being done, both in the torture and in the disposal of the tapes. The history of this administration is that if you believe the very worst of them, then you are still giving them too much credit.

Larry's conclusion:

Jose Rodriguez did not consult beforehand with Kyle “Dusty” Foggo. However, Jose did inform Dusty subsequently of the advice he received from the OGC’s counsel. Jose may not be in as much trouble as some imagined. If he destroyed the tapes before November 14, 2005 then the C.I.A. told the truth to the judge. The May 2003 date puts the onus on Jim Pavitt and George Tenet rather than Jose Rodriguez. They knew about the tapes and the C.I.A. General Counsel lied to a Federal Judge. Who told whom what then? That’s going to be the interesting question.

And last but not least. The top two Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees–the so-called “gang of eight”–were fully briefed in interrogation techniques several times during 2002-3. They concurred unanimously that the interrogation techniques were OK. This means that Democrats as well as Republicans backed this process.

It seems reasonably clear that members of the bush administration, right up to and including Bush himself, committed actions that are criminal under both U.S. law and international law regarding human rights.

Why? That's simple. Because they wanted to since the 90's at least, and they very likely felt that 9/11 freed them to conduct torture. They wanted to, and they felt justified. After a while I'm sure some doubts crept in, and some government officials weren't willing to conduct criminal operations just because the boss said to, so lawyers like John Yoo cranked out what appeared to be legal justifications for their actions. I'd guess they still had relatively little faith in those justifications, because they kept them so tightly hidden under rules of security.

If anyone of any significant rank goes on trial, there will be a combination of PR justification and contributions to the legal fund like "Scooter" Libby has gotten, as well as a decent job on wingnut welfare when it is over. (Scooter is at the Hudson Institute at $168,000 per year while he writes a book that will net even more money. Then he will probably start making speeches after the Bush administration ends. He is too controversial to do so now. My bet is $30,000 to $50,000 per speech.) The final element of protection will be the list of Pardons that Bush will sign sometime between the election in November and the time he leaves office in late January 2009. so although I am certain that crimes were committed, I am a lot less certain that anyone will pay any penalty for committing them.

TPM Muckraker has been kind enough to provide a timeline of the torture tapes incident. It is an excellent complement to the article by Larry Johnson, and both provide links to other sources.

Here's what torturing suspects gets us - besides world opprobrium.

Does anyone really think torture works outside of the fiction of "24"? Kevin Drum did some research into why the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, was tortured

After the 2002 capture of Abu Zubaydah, a bin Laden deputy, failed to yield much information due to his drowsiness from medical treatment, Bush allegedly told Tenet, "Who authorized putting him on pain medication?

and how effective the torture (depicted on the videotapes that were destroyed by the CIA) really was:

So here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was

• (a) unimportant and low-ranking,
• (b) mentally unstable,
• (c) had no useful information, and
• (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress.

This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel.

Nice trifecta there. And just think: there's an entire political party in this country that still thinks this is OK.
[Bullet points added to increase clarity]

Remember, not only is the torture clearly ineffective, it is morally wrong. Yet the Republican Party, largely populated by people who call themselves Christians, applaud this behavior and conceal it from investigation when they can.

Go read the rest of Kevin's excellent post.

Then go read Larry Johnson's post Torture Tapes on the CIA backstory behind the tapes that were destroyed.

In addition, TPM has been all over the story. Here are some of their recent posts:

• CIA ignored warnings about interrogation videos
  
• Hamilton sees obstruction and
  
• Compromising prosecutions?

This should give the flavor of the story. Kevin's post gives the best analysis of why captured al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was tortured and what the real result of that torture was.

America has tried waterborders as criminals for over a century

Waterboarding - war crime or Intelligence tool?

First, eaactly what is waterboarding? JAG officer Evan Wallach explains:

The victim may be immersed in water, have water forced into the nose and mouth, or have water poured onto material placed over the face so that the liquid is inhaled or swallowed. The media usually characterize the practice as "simulated drowning." That's incorrect. To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death. That is, the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. According to those who have studied waterboarding's effects, it can cause severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years.

Whether or not waterboarding (making a prisoner believe they are being drowned) is torture or not has been answered by experts. It is torture. Ask Malcolm Nance, a navy expert who has trained Navy seals in how to deal with torture and who has himslef been subject to waterboarding.

Or look at the history of American prosecution of people for applying waterboarding to people. Again from JAG officer Evan Wallach :

After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding. [Snip]

...a number of Japanese prison-camp officers and guards were convicted of torture that clearly violated the laws of war. They were not the only defendants convicted in such cases. As far back as the U.S. occupation of the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. soldiers were court-martialed for using the "water cure" to question Filipino guerrillas.

More recently, waterboarding cases have appeared in U.S. district courts. One was a civil action brought by several Filipinos seeking damages against the estate of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. The plaintiffs claimed they had been subjected to torture, including water torture. The court awarded $766 million in damages, noting in its findings that "the plaintiffs experienced human rights violations including, but not limited to . . . the water cure, where a cloth was placed over the detainee's mouth and nose, and water producing a drowning sensation."

In 1983, federal prosecutors charged a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies with violating prisoners' civil rights by forcing confessions. The complaint alleged that the officers conspired to "subject prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning."

The four defendants were convicted, and the sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Here is more detail on the Japanese who we Americans convicted of war crimes for using waterboarding:

But after World War II, the United States government was quite clear about the fact that waterboarding was torture, at least when it was done to U.S. citizens:

But after World War II, the United States government was quite clear about the fact that waterboarding was torture, at least when it was done to U.S. citizens:

[In] 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

“Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. “We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II,” he sai[d]

So America has defined waterboarding as torture and as a war crime since the Spanish-american war. Now, under George Bush we have a Republican government who is arguing that for some strange reason, waterboarding is no longer torture, and in fact that it is necessary to use it to protect American security!

So waterboarding has been a U.S. crime for over a century. To top the issue off, it does not work. As Navy SERE instructor Malcolm Nance recounted discussing what he was told by a torture victim of the Khmer Rouge:

On a Mekong River trip, I met a 60-year-old man, happy to be alive and a cheerful travel companion, who survived the genocide and torture … he spoke openly about it and gave me a valuable lesson: “If you want to survive, you must learn that ‘walking through a low door means you have to be able to bow.’” He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know including the truth. They rarely stopped. In torture, he confessed to being a hermaphrodite, a CIA spy, a Buddhist Monk, a Catholic Bishop and the son of the king of Cambodia. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.

So what makes to Bush administration and the Republican Party so ready to abandon American values? Is it fear or is it just an effort to gain votes from the Republican Party voters? Either way, waterboarding is totally UnAmerican. In addition it violates the international agreements on human rights. Then, to top off the reasons not to use it - Torture simply doesn't work to get useful Intelligence.

Trying individuals who use waterboarding as war criminals and severely punishing them is the only appropriate American approach to such torture.

There remains no doubt that waterboarding is torture and a war . In addition, history had demonstrate without question that it doesn't work, so it cannot be a tool of Intelligence. The very fact that so-called Americans have even been forced to debate the morality of such obviously immoral and criminal behavior is a total indictment of the failure of the Bush administration.

Rendition, torture provided fake story of Saddam training al Qaeda used to justify Iraq invasion .

Before the invasion of Iraq, Frontline offered a show that purported to prove that Saddam was training al Qaeda terrorists at a special training facility south of Baghdad. The same "Intelligence" as reported by the CIA was included in Colin Powell's unfortunate address to the UN before the Iraq invasion.

This so-called Intelligence was a result of the CIA's rendition program, in which ibn al Sheik al Libi, previously the commander of an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, was interrogated for Intelligence. This was what happened:

Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons. This evidence was used by Colin Powell at the United Nations a year earlier (February 2003) to justify the war in Iraq. ("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 said. "Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.")

But now, hearing how the information was obtained, the CIA was soon to retract all this intelligence. A Feb. 5 cable records that al Libi was told by a "foreign government service" (Egypt) that: "the next topic was al-Qa'ida's connections with Iraq...This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story."

Al Libi indicated that his interrogators did not like his responses and then "placed him in a small box approximately 50cm X 50cm [20 inches x 20 inches]." He claimed he was held in the box for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, al Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to "tell the truth." When al Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al Libi claimed that "he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back." Al Libi told CIA debriefers that he then "was punched for 15 minutes." (Sourced to CIA cable, Feb. 5, 2004).

Here was a cable then that informed Washington that one of the key pieces of evidence for the Iraq war -- the al Qaeda/Iraq link -- was not only false but extracted by effectively burying a prisoner alive.

As Naval SERE instructor and Intelligence interrogator Malcolm Nance has pointed out, torture (like water boarding) Does not provide reliable Intelligence! A person subject to torture will say anything just to get it to stop and Interrogators have no way of knowing what is true and what is not. The subject of torture is simply looking for whatever story will satisfy his torturer.

Malcolm Nance is going to testify before a Congressional Hearing soon about the way the training from the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program was "reverse-engineered" to provide torture techniques for CIA Interrogators to use. Here is an important part of what he will say:

...subcommittee members will get an earful about the unacceptability of reverse-engineering SERE torture-resistance techniques in order to design torture regimens to use on detainees in the war on terrorism.

"Our body of experience shows a friendly approach is most successful" in interrogation, Nance says. SERE's historical memory goes back to the French and Indian Wars in understanding torture methods that captured U.S. troops might face and devising strategies to resist them. He relates the story of Hans Joachim Scharff, a master Luftwaffe interrogator who spurned abusive techniques used by the Gestapo (also, interestingly, termed "enhanced interrogation") in favor of rapport-building. Scharff's legendary success is still studied by U.S. interrogators. Unfortunately, he says, "after Guantanamo, I thought, how can anyone at SERE ever teach the Geneva Conventions again?"

A trove of accumulated institutional familiarity with torture led to a slide that Nance shares, from an old (and unclassified) SERE PowerPoint presentation to trainees. It asks outright, "Why Is Torture The Worst Interrogation Method?" The first answer: "Produces Unreliable Information."

Nance remarks, "Two centuries of knowledge were thrown out the window" when the administration decided after 9/11 that, to use Cofer Black's famous phrase, "the gloves come off." What administration officials mistakenly thought, Nance says, is that "these were actually gloves, not empirical data. Dude, it's not a glove. It's a fact. But they thought it was one more tool in the tool box."

The result, Nance says, is that al-Qaeda now has, essentially, its own SERE school in U.S. detention facilities, as released detainees have given numerous accounts of their interrogations. What's more, he warns that the world is about to see an uptick in the use of torture as "cops in Bogota, everyone" now believes that the U.S. has lent torture its imprimatur -- or, at least, isn't in a credible position to criticize foreign countries' human rights abuses. He says he's testifying in part to help his old comrades in SERE, which he sees as a vital tool for training U.S. troops. "SERE needs to be increased," Nance insists, "but what needs to be stopped is the transfer of SERE techniques to official interrogations."

The pro-torture Republicans can't argue with what his testimony will be and what the history is. Torture doesn't provide good Intelligence. So expect the Republican questions to focus on his qualification and the basis for his testimony.

McCain and the Republican problem with torture

Digby, discussing torture and waterboarding, makes a really good observation about the Republican Party:

McCain is a bloodthirsty right wing warmonger. But he's not an outright sadist. That is the range of what passes for morality among the GOP candidates.

And by the way, he's losing because of it.

That's the range of debate within the Republican Party. War - Good. Torture - Well, McCain is opposed to it, but the Republican Party as a whole is for it.

When did Americans reach a level so low that the only issue is what is the most extreme form of torture Americans should be authorized by the President to use.

Whatever happened to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee? This torture discussion among the Republicans is as UnAmerican as anything I have ever heard of.

Republicans support torture

They quibble that they are interrogating individuals and trying to get extremely important Intelligence from them, but every Intelligence professional who has recently spoken publicly on the subject has agreed - torture doesn't work. Individuals subject to torture generally lie or give information they don't really have.

Waterboarding is torture. So is subjecting subjects to low temperatures for long periods of time, or (as was done to Jose Padilla and to many Guantanamo detainees) subjecting them to long periods of isolation. None of these things are effective substitutes for effective and well-planned interrogation regimes, and none of the methods of interrogation work rapidly even when they do work.

So why do conservatives demand that the use of torture techniques be approved by the Congress?

It's the same reason why parents hit children. The parents give the excuse that they are trying to stop the child from doing something, but the fact is that the parents are feeling angry or frustrated and want to punish the child for inflicting those emotions on them.

Torturing those who are declared enemies is exactly the same thing. It is a way for an angry person to punish his enemies. That's the basis for approval and recommendation of torture by those who do not actually do it themselves.

The individuals who then are interrogating the subjects without result and who are being pressured by their commanders for fast results will, if not well trained, try anything to relieve their own feelings of failure and inadequacy as their leaders try to force them to produce rapid results.

In short, the Republicans at high levels approve of torture because it matches the anger they constantly feel when they are opposed by anyone.

Republicans represent torture, lawlessness, secrecy , lies

The New York Times presented a lengthy article on the way the Bush administration and the Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzalez implemented the harshest "interrogation" techniques possible. Then, when Congress tried to stop them, the administration secretly declared that the torture techniques did not violate the law passed by Congress.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

The excuse for the secrecy was so that that America's enemies couldn't train to beat the torture techniques, but the real reason was so that the American public would not know how utterly depraved the Bush administration and the Republican Party had become.

This was no accident or action by an out-of-control underling. The secret declaration that the torture techniques would be used in spite of the law passed by Congress was one of Bush's signing statements.

It's not as though there wasn't a problem in determining what should or could be done to interrogate prisoners. Here is what the CIA was doing:

slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

“We were getting asked about combinations — ‘Can we do this and this at the same time?’” recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: “These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature — can they be combined?” Or “Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme?”

There was a problem that needed to be resolved in what could be done, but to do it in secret the way the Bush administration did it is an overt admission that the people of the Bush administration knew they were being too extreme and did not want the public to know what they were authorizing.

Let's say that again. President Bush explicitly and in secret declared that the use of torture would be the policy of the American government! He took this action in secret even as he told the American public that he had disavowed the use of torture by the U.S. government. The Republicans in Congress support this, and in the Senate they are doing everything they can to prevent Congressional oversight.

One thing to keep in mind. The Bush administration and the Republican Party took made these torture decisions in secret and hidden behind lies for fear of how the American public would react. That means that the decision to conduct these torture techniques, much like the peremptory invasion of Iraq based on lies, is the responsibility of the Republican Party. When actions are taken by criminals without the knowledge of the American public, it is not conducted by America. It is conducted by those lying Republicans and they are wholly responsible for such decisions and actions.

Bush and the Republican Party represent a cancer on the body politic of America. They are criminals, not politicians. They must at a minimum be removed from government.

Bush's true barbarity

The Bush administration has gone far beyond just its efforts to create an omnipotent "King George" in defiance of the U.S. Constitution. In foreign affairs Bush, Cheney and the CIA have practiced torture on a scale no modern American administration has ever even considered. Glen Greenwald provides a description.

Mr. Arar was sent by American intelligence officials in October 2002 to Syria, where he was tortured and jailed for a almost a year. Last September, an extensive Canadian inquiry concluded that the terrorism accusations against him were groundless.

[Snip]

The newly released sections indicate that neither the Syrian government nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation were convinced that Mr. Arar was a significant security threat. They also suggest that the investigation of Mr. Arar was prompted by the coerced confession of Ahmad Abou el-Maati, a Kuwaiti-born Canadian who was also imprisoned and tortured in Syria.

And despite claims by the United States government that Mr. Arar's removal to Syria was mainly an immigration matter, the new material suggests that the Central Intelligence Agency led the action.

But this is only the torture which was outsourced. Look at the torture program operated by the CIA itself in its black sites outside the United States:

"The C.I.A.'s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It's one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you've heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling'" . . . .
[Underlining mine - Editor WTF-o]

This is not a rogue operation like the one alleged to have occurred in Abu Ghraib with no knowledge of the chain of command.

...the treatment of high-value detainees has been directly, and repeatedly, approved by President Bush.

The program is monitored closely by C.I.A. lawyers, and supervised by the agency's director and his subordinates at the Counterterrorism Center. While Mohammed was being held by the agency, detailed dossiers on the treatment of detainees were regularly available to the former C.I.A. director George Tenet, according to informed sources inside and outside the agency. Through a spokesperson, Tenet denied making day-to-day decisions about the treatment of individual detainees. But, according to a former agency official, "Every single plan is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to the highest possible level -- meaning the director of the C.I.A. Any change in the plan -- even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added -- was signed off by the C.I.A. director."

We are learning more about what George Tenet did to earn his "Medal of Freedom." Besides telling Bush what he wanted to hear to justify the invasion of Iraq and then shifting the blame to the CIA he also operated this massively detailed torture program and kept day-by-day, tortured-prisoner-by-tortured-prisoner control of the torture process. Meanwhile Bush has been thoroughly informed and has personally approved of the requirement to torture individuals detained by the CIA.

Glenn Greenwald points out

As always, it is vital to underscore that there is much of what we have done -- likely the most extreme and criminal aspects -- which remain undisclosed. But based solely on what we do know, we have become a country that not merely in isolation, but as overarching policy, embraces some of the most grotesque human rights abuses in the world. That is a difficult fact to acknowledge, but documented reports of our conduct make it inescapably true.

This is not a rogue operator or someone acting desperately because they feel there is some specific "ticking bomb that must be defused." This has been carefully planned, researched, choreographed and practiced as a matter of government policy. And that's just the elements of the torture program that we know about!

Glenn ends up making this point:

While American citizens inside of the U.S. still enjoy robust civil liberties as compared to most other countries around the world -- certainly nobody rational would compare the tyranny of a country like Libya to the state of domestic political affairs inside the U.S. -- one cannot say the same for our behavior as a world actor. In that regard, such comparisons are not only plausible but indisputably valid.

Could the Bush administration have possibly done any more to inflame public opinion - especially in the Middle East - against the rogue state, America?

This is far beyond stupidity. It is utter depraved intentional viciousness clothed as a set of government programs. It is worthy of Argentina's Gen. Galtieri and Chile's President Augusto Pinochet.

Bush has done bin Laden's work for him. Can anyone honestly stand up now and ask "Why do they hate us so?"