Caught In A Lie - Torture's Smoking Gun

[Winstonm]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/04/...urce=newsletter

 

To hear former President Bush tell it, you would think the United States only turned to the techniques in desperation. When Bush announced the existence of the CIA's interrogation program in September 2006, for example, he argued that suspected al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah stopped cooperating with interrogators after his capture on March 28, 2002, forcing the agency to get rough. "We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives," Bush said. "But he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation," the president said. "And so, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures."

 

Not to worry, the president explained. "The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively, and determined them to be lawful."

 

But that's not how it happened.

 

And now there is rising suspicion that the torture was used to falsify evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection in order to promote war.

 

"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 being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the Senate report as saying about Guantánamo. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

 

But I suppose the idea that Cheney and Rumsfeld would condone SERE-type torture in full knowledge that any information thus received would only be worthwhile as propaganda to falsify the reason to start a pre-planned war is just another wacko conspiracy theory.

 

The world's greatest threats have always come and to continue to be from those who are utterly convinced that what they believe is right.

 

There is more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq/story/66622.html

 

From the McClatchy story:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. 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," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

 

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."

 

If this isn't enough to cause the outrage necessary to file criminal charges against Cheney and Rumsfeld and open a criminal investigation into the whole process then we might as well close and nail tight the shutters, take down the flag, and rename this place Bananastan.

[jonottawa]

Dude, you've been livin' in Bananastan for 7 years and change now. Haven't you been payin' attention?

[PassedOut]

These reports are truly sobering. It had escaped me that the legal memos authorizing the torture date from August, 2002, months after the torture began. That the torture (so it appears) was also used in an attempt to coerce false statements affirming a link between Iraq and al Qaeda puts a different light on the whole matter.

 

So far I have not read any rebuttals to these reports and caution myself to avoid premature conclusions. But perhaps everyone involved will actually welcome "a day in court" to get their defenses to these allegations before the public.

[Winstonm]

These reports are truly sobering. It had escaped me that the legal memos authorizing the torture date from August, 2002, months after the torture began. That the torture (so it appears) was also used in an attempt to coerce false statements affirming a link between Iraq and al Qaeda puts a different light on the whole matter.

 

So far I have not read any rebuttals to these reports and caution myself to avoid premature conclusions. But perhaps everyone involved will actually welcome "a day in court" to get their defenses to these allegations before the public.

If these had been simply speculation it would not get to me so much - but this is from an investigation led by John Conyers, and thus is more credible.

 

I do not put it past people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz to have authorised torture techniques for no other reason than to accumulate sworn lies that they could use as propaganda - not because they are evil people but because they suffer from the delusion that made them much more dangerous than an evil person could ever be - they believed that what they were right, regardless of what the evidence showed and regardless of any other plausible explanation.

 

It is the same self-righteous delusion that drove torture druing the Inqusition, and caused the burning of so-called witches in Salem.

 

And it still lives today.

[Winstonm]

This is from Jason Ditz:

 

One former official in particular pointed to former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as “demanding proof of the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq that Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

 

Despite the systemic use of torture against detainees, the full extent of which is only now becoming apparent, the administration was never able to link Iraq with al-Qaeda. This did not, of course, stop the administration from claiming such evidence existed and using it as part of the pretext for the 2003 invasion. This inevitably raised the question of why it was so important to waterboard detainees scores of times in a single month in an attempt to provide evidence they were perfectly willing to manufacture out of wholecloth. The pressure to come up with authentic evidence where none existed does appear, however, to have played a central role in some of the interrogators’ worst excesses.

 

This now helps to make clear why it was necessary to create a seperate intelligence gathering agency within the Pentagon that could produce the desired propaganda.

 

Oh, what a tangled web we weave....

[Winstonm]

Let us never forget that the Bush-Cheney administration, under the Military Commissions Act of 2006--a law drafted by some of the same parties that devised the rationale for torture--was given the power to seek punishments by secret tribunals against defendants with evidence obtained under torture. We are speaking not about a few mistakes, but an influential distortion of the American constitution, put into practice by military police and military lawyers, after being drafted by government lawyers higher up, all with the consent of both houses of Congress.

[Winstonm]

Guardian.co.uk has awakened as well.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ci...raq-al-qaida-us

 

They Guardian did not mince words and made a direct allegation:

 

These techniques, in turn, had been adopted from methods used by Chinese and North Korean communists to extract false confessions from detainees. It's perhaps fitting, if deeply reprehensible, that such techniques were used to generate false evidence of an operational relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam.

 

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

[Winstonm]

The Telegraph.co.uk chimes in: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...d-not-work.html

 

But there was intense pressure from the White House to prove that al-Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The desired answers were not being obtained through standard interrogation methods

[Lobowolf]

It is the same self-righteous delusion that...caused the burning of so-called witches in Salem.

They were hanged, actually. Minor historical point of interest.

[Winstonm]

Connecting the dots - if you cannot torture propaganda from them, just create you own intelligence findings that proves your case:

 

Published on Friday, February 9, 2007 by McClatchy Newspapers 

Pentagon Office Produced 'Alternative' Intelligence on Iraq 

by Jonathan S. Landay

 

A special unit run by former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's top policy aide inappropriately produced "alternative" intelligence reports that wrongly concluded that Saddam Hussein's regime had cooperated with al-Qaida, a Pentagon investigation has determined

.

[PassedOut]

In the aftermath of Obama's release of the torture memos, the flood of damning information has begun. Frank Rich had a good piece on this topic yesterday: The Banality of Bush White House Evil

 

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.

 

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

 

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

 

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

 

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

This is not going to go away.

[mike777]

So far no one has cited under what law the CIA can capture and interrogate people in other countries. How can it be legal for the CIA or their surrogates to interrogate people against their will in a foreign country? What rights do the prisoners have?

 

I would think the very act of capturing these people is a form of torture and is an extreme measure.

 

I mean they are spies not the police. Can the CIA just grab someone in Pakistan, London or Paris or China or Russia or Africa and interrogate them and it is legal?

 

Lets follow the law and not have the CIA and those who allow the CIA to do this including Congress the President and VP not end up in front of the Hague on trial.

 

Again I am all for having the CIA employees and the surrogates they work with follow the full letter of the law but lets get specific here, exactly how can the CIA interrogate anyone and have it be legal? How can it be legal for the CIA ever to use violence or the threat of violence in another country?

 

 

BTW dudes this has been going on for 50 years not 7 years and it seems to continue to go on today.

 

A good first step is for the CIA to stop interrogating anyone without a full boat of lawyers around to make sure everything is under the law.

[Winstonm]

The one thing Nuremberg accomplished was to invalidate the claim that "following orders" was a justifiable defense. The U.S. acknowledges this principle:

 

It was in September 2003 at Tal-Afar air base, northern Iraq, that Specialist Peterson, serving with a military intelligence section of the 101st Airborne, came across interrogation methods very different from the ones she had known in training. An Arab-speaker, Peterson was assigned to work as an interpreter at interrogation sessions in a unit known as "The Cage". After only two nights, she refused to take further part in the sessions and was reassigned

 

Notice there was no court martial for Specialist Peterson for disobeying orders.

 

Likewise, the F.B.I. refused to take part in the CIA torture.

 

If the CIA is as out-of-control as you imply, Mike, then it is time to bring them into line.

[Trinidad]

So far no one has cited under what law the CIA can capture and interrogate people in other countries. How can it be legal for the CIA or their surrogates to interrogate people against their will? What rights do the prisoners have?

 

I would think the very act of capturing these people is a form of torture and is an extreme measure.

 

I mean they are spies not the police. Can the  CIA just grab someone in Pakistan, London or Paris or China or Russia or Africa and interrogate them and it is legal?

 

Lets follow the law and not have the CIA and those who allow the CIA to do this including Congress the President and VP not end up in front of the Hague on trial.

Welcome to the rest of the world, Mike.

 

Yes, the CIA can. They do it all the time. They will 'interrogate' people or simply kill them. Obviously, it isn't legal, but who cares?

 

In the countries where they carry out these acts, this is called kidnapping or murder. But who can catch a CIA agent?

 

And if these agents are caught and brought to trial, an immense diplomatic row follows. The country in question has seized an innocent US citizen! Then this 'hero' is convicted by a 'fake court' for his 'fabricated crimes'!

 

Usually, the end of the story is that the agent is bought back (which within the USA is sold as "ransom money was paid"), with the promise that he will serve his sentence in the USA. And then the US doesn't keep the promise.

 

The sad part of the story is that the CIA is not only stronger than the banana republics where they do their 'work'. The CIA is also stronger than the US government and the US people, since they are not able to stop this. I wish Obama good luck. I fear that Joe Biden will be the next president after Obama has been murdered.

 

Rik

[mike777]

The one thing Nuremberg accomplished was to invalidate the claim that "following orders" was a justifiable defense. The U.S. acknowledges this principle:

 

It was in September 2003 at Tal-Afar air base, northern Iraq, that Specialist Peterson, serving with a military intelligence section of the 101st Airborne, came across interrogation methods very different from the ones she had known in training. An Arab-speaker, Peterson was assigned to work as an interpreter at interrogation sessions in a unit known as "The Cage". After only two nights, she refused to take further part in the sessions and was reassigned

 

Notice there was no court martial for Specialist Peterson for disobeying orders.

 

Likewise, the F.B.I. refused to take part in the CIA torture.

 

If the CIA is as out-of-control as you imply, Mike, then it is time to bring them into line.

Winston, seriously do you have any idea what the CIA actually does oversees? Have you ever read a spynovel or seen a spy movie?

 

Posters seem to think the CIA never existed before 2002.

 

I am all for following the law and applying the law to all. The suggestion by some to just apply it to a few lawyers is not Justice. Lets find out who knew what and when and put them all on trial.

[mike777]

"The sad part of the story is that the CIA is not only stronger than the banana republics where they do their 'work'. The CIA is also stronger than the US government and the US people, since they are not able to stop this. I wish Obama good luck. I fear that Joe Biden will be the next president after Obama has been murdered"

 

Lets hope no one gets murdered and Obama can stop the CIA.

[mike777]

A new expose gives an account of the CIA’s secret efforts to develop new forms of torture spanning fifty years. It reveals how the CIA perfected its methods, distributing them across the world from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, uncovering the roots of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture scandals. The book is titled “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror.”

 

•Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Author of “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror” and also “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.”

 

 

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2006/2/17/prof..._the_history_of

 

 

 

"Months later, the agency began a program to explore "avenues to the control of human behavior," as John Marks discusses in his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. During the next decade and a half, CIA experts honed the use of "chemical and biological materials capable of producing human behavioral and physiological changes" according to a retrospective CIA catalog written in 1963. And thus soft torture in the United States was born"

 

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2130301/

[Winstonm]

Winston, seriously do you have any idea what the CIA actually does oversees?

 

Unfortunately, yes. Which is why IMO the CIA should be controlled.

 

I am all for following the law and applying the law to all. The suggestion by some to just apply it to a few lawyers is not Justice. Lets find out who knew what and when and put them all on trial.

 

I agree. This is not a partisan issue - it is a choice whether we elect to be a nation of laws or of outlaws.

 

However, I disagree with you trying to make this a CIA issue, when it clearly is not so. It is an issue of who used the CIA and for what purpose. The smoking gun looks to be held tightly in the hands of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, not that should come as a shock to anyone.

[blackshoe]

Winston, seriously do you have any idea what the CIA actually does oversees? Have you ever read a spynovel or seen a spy movie?

I think the CIA needs to be brought to heel, but I also think that anyone who believes that spy novels and movies paint an accurate picture of what the CIA does needs his head examined.

[mike777]

Winston, seriously do you have any idea what the CIA actually does oversees? Have you ever read a spynovel or seen a  spy movie?

I think the CIA needs to be brought to heel, but I also think that anyone who believes that spy novels and movies paint an accurate picture of what the CIA does needs his head examined.

lol I quoted two spy novels....spy books...sigh I just knew someone would make just this type of inane reply.

 

Actually I have talked with real ones, they were my clients. One guy was the unknown(at the time) spy that was held in Iran during the 1980 hostage crises. He got messages out to the CIA that were very helpful during the crises. No doubt some with good search skills can find his story.

 

Six other books to give a small taste of what the CIA does are:

 

First In....Afghanistan by Schroen

Why America Slept by Posner

Losing Bin Laden by Minter

The Best and the Brightest by Halberstam

The Looming Tower by Wright

Intelligence in War by Keegan

[mike777]

"However, I disagree with you trying to make this a CIA issue, when it clearly is not so."

 

 

We disagree, it is a CIA issue.

1) I quoted two books that show torture is not something going on just since 2002 but for 50 years.

2) Clearly the CIA has been capturing people, stealing stuff, and killing people for at least 50 years.

3) Of course then the analysts back in the USA use these stolen data goods and they know it is stolen.

 

 

 

"Unfortunately, yes. Which is why IMO the CIA should be controlled.

 

 

Controlled how, it is this unspecific stuff that gets the CIA in trouble.

 

BTW people say Control the CIA but control it to do what? Follow the law? Exactly what law and what does it allow the CIA to legally do?

 

To at least start a discussion:

 

At the very least they can stop stealing stuff, killing people and interrogating people in their quest to gather intelligence? They can stop using violence or the threat of violence themselves or through the people they associate with?

 

We know torture is out, now lets define it in detail...

[Al_U_Card]

Every country has had spies since there were countries to spy on (and from).

 

The OSS after the WWII was converted into the CIA and told to never deal in domestic matters.

 

Dulles was fired by JFK for his over-reaching in many areas. He was on the Warren Commission...guess he couldn't have been involved in a conflict of interest there....nah...

 

Someone had to get the drug trade going...to insure that enough $$$ was available for those black ops that were really really really necessary for national security...to say nothing of the arms needed to help "freedom fighters" everywhere that US military-industrial interests were in danger...

[mike777]

As many posters have articulated the issue is not does torture work or not but what values should the CIA and our intellegent gathering services expouse and emulate.

 

As P.O said he would let Americans die if it went going against these values to gain information.

 

So far I have not seen any Congress or President including the current one agree with this in my lifetime.

 

Given this we can only expect to see our Spies continue to do illegal/immoral violent stuff going forward. Do not be shocked or surprised.

[Winstonm]

Although Mike is trying to hijack the thread and misdirect our attention, the issue is not now nor has it ever been simply the CIA.

 

Abu Gharaib and Guantanemo were not CIA issues. The plain facts of the matter are coming closer to being exposed, and the picture being painted is quite simply that of the Vice-president and the Secretary of Defense authorizing torture in order to validate at any cost the agenda to which they were already tied.

 

The timing can't be much clearer: the Bybee memo came within a week of the Downing Street Memo and within a month of Cheney going on "Meet the Press" and claiming a proven connection betwen Iraq and Al-Qaeda.

 

And then there was the creation of a seperate intelligence organization within the Pentagon that was headed by Feith which reported to Rumsfeld, where the yellowcake allogations surfaced which led to the subsequent outing of Valerie Plame.

 

Add it up. It's pretty simple math. The neo-nuts, of whom Cheney was a lead player, had a grand plan to invade Iraq as part of a larger war. However, they had no justification for the invasion, no connection could be found linking Al-Qaeda to Iraq, so SERE reverse-engineered torture was condoned, which had only been used in the past by Communist regimes to accumulate false confessions for propaganda purposes, leading to the conclusion that truthful confessions were not the goal of condoning these methods.

 

These people were not trying to stop another attack - they were trying to justify their war plans.

[Winstonm]

As P.O said he would let Americans die if it went going against these values to gain information.

 

This is simply tacky. Not only did P.O. not say this, but no one else did, either, and it is the same cheap logic fallacy as asking "Have you stopped beating your wife?", as it presumes that torture prevents Americans from dying.