Demonstrating an “enhanced interrogation technique”
In 1999, Bush‘s family biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, reports that W. told him he was intent on invading Iraq, saying that his status as a war time president would give him enough political capital to push through his conservative domestic agenda.
(That would include the privatization of social security whose blood rich corpse would be served up to his Wall Street vampire buddies to feast upon. Not to mention the Oedipal angle of wanting to do his daddy one better by “finishing” the job of deposing Saddam Hussein.)
Fast forward to 9/11/01. The dust of the collapsed Trade Towers hadn’t even settled when W. ordered his terrorism Czar Richard Clarke to find a link to Saddam in the attacks. Clarke was dubious, but ordered a review anyway, producing a dry hole (something which Bush the failed oil tycoon was all too familiar with).
Meanwhile, US troops were sent to Afghanistan to hunt down Usama bin Laden. SECDEF Rumsfeld complained that there were no good targets left to bomb there and rapidly warmed to the idea of invading Iraq. Special ops troops that were originally set to finish off Al Qaeda in Tora Bora were instead reassigned to prepare for Iraq, allowing them to escape and regroup in the hinterlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan (where they have grown even stronger and now threaten to bring down the nuclear armed government of Pakistan).
Despite efforts to provoke Saddam into providing an overt rationale for an invasion, he lay low, forcing the Bushies to explore other means around which a rationale for war could be devised— fixing the facts around the policy, as the Downing Street Memo so artfully put it.
Discussions were had with the Brits to paint a UN logo on a drone and send it flying lazily over Iraq air space where it could be shot down. Ahmed Chalabi was paid $300,000 a month to produce ex-pat informants like “Curveball” to ‘prove’ that Saddam was actively engaged in producing WMD. Ex-military “consultants” (with monetary ties to defense contractors ready to make a killing supplying product and services to the war effort) flooded the network and cable news shows warning of dire consequences if we didn’t depose Saddam.
Neocons like Richard Perle and Bill Kristol, administration officials like Condi Rice and Darth Cheney, egged on by war mongering talking heads too numerous to mention, took to the airways wielding images of mushroom clouds and cartoons of mobile bio-weapons labs to create an aura of dread in the American people. Homeland Security helped keep fear alive with their color coded threat charts, displayed so helpfully on the evening news. Cable news networks ratings soared as they created “war rooms” tricked out with state of the art graphics and martial theme music, eagerly awaiting the latest nosecone videos of missiles slamming into buildings in an orchestrated spectacle of “shock and awe.”
Which brings us to the latest dot in the narrative, the so-called “torture memos.” The lead story in today’s NY Times reveals that the methods, further detailed in a now declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY used what are euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” were originally developed by the ChiComs and North Koreans in the 1950s, and used as a training regime called SERE (Search, Evade, Rescue, Escape) by our own military to help captured troops resist interrogation.
Apparently, some genius in the Bush Administration figured that adopting those same techniques for offensive purposes would mitigate objections that they constituted torture. “Hey, we use them on our own guys, and they don’t suffer any long term effects.” Three major problems with that theory:
1. SERE candidates KNOW in advance that they aren’t going to die or suffer long term physical or psychological harm, where alleged enemy combatants are assured they will.
2. Expert interrogators came to the conclusion long ago that information obtained from torture isn’t reliable (sending valuable assets on wild goose chases, degrading their ability to follow real leads).
3. The “brainwashing” techniques from which the Bush Administration’s torture regime was derived was specifically DESIGNED TO PRODUCE FALSE CONFESSIONS FOR PROPAGANDA PURPOSES. HuLO-OH… (I still recall grainy black and white film of harried looking POWs from the Korean War, denouncing America; dozens of videos of John McCain doing the same thing in Vietnam have yet to see the light of day).
Having failed to produce any real evidence of Saddam’s “imminent threat” to US security, it had to be manufactured. These “confessions” were exactly what was needed to conflate Saddam with Usama bin Laden, Iraq with 9/11. Recall what W. said to Katie Couric in an interview on September 6, 2006:
One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.
Of course he meant that in the present and future tense, but it neatly sums up the whole rationale for the initial torture regime. And once lodged firmly inside Iraq (Mission Accomplished!), these same techniques were used on Iraqi civilians in places like Abu Ghraib to further promote a terrorist connection. (As if trying to repel an invader wasn’t motivation enough for a patriotic Iraqi to take up arms against US troops.) Bush went on to tell Couric:
I believe it, but the American people have got to understand that a defeat in Iraq, in other words if this government there fails, the terrorists will be emboldened, the radicals will topple moderate governments. I truly believe that this is the ideological struggle of the 21st century. And the consequences for not achieving success are dire.
Naturally, he fails to mention that Al Qaeda didn’t exist in Iraq before he invaded it; that Saddam’s secular regime, brutal as it was, provided an effective check against a now greatly empowered Iran; that it squandered America’s moral and political authority in the world; helped bankrupt the US treasury; and, short of nuking Mecca, acted as the greatest recruiting tool for Islamic militants imaginable.
No wonder Cheney is in such a snit about releasing memos allegedly proving the efficacy of his little torture regime. Whatever limited value waterboarding someone 6x a day for month might have had, there’s always the question of why real intel can’t be obtained legally. (World War II interrogators found that playing chess with Nazi soldiers produced far more actionable intel than beating them senseless.)
Only a full vetting— and prosecution— of the Bush-Cheney torture regime and the role it played in launching two disastrous wars will allow the US to reclaim any credibility that it is a country dedicated to the rule of law.
Frank Rich in his column today:
An ounce of 9/11 truth would eviscerate any waffle thin remnant of thug credibility.
Allowance with full disclose is the time transcendent means of quashing rebellion.
Cheney’s got a book to write and sell. Sort of blows his whole premise that he kept America safe by waterboarding some guy 6x a day for month if it turns out that torture did the country more harm than good, an argument that Bob Baer did a good job of making last night on MSNBC.
Right now, all he’s got is his “We weren’t attacked after 9/11” argument (ignoring the fact that it wasn’t in AQ’s interest to do so, especially after the negative reaction that followed in the Muslim world, and the recruiting bonanza handed to them from the invasion of Iraq).
Update:
Juan Cole has more on the torture for propaganda angle:
“Jonathan S. Landay at McClatchy has discovered the real reason that Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad were tortured dozens of times in the run-up to the Iraq War. It was because Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were trying to get them to say that Saddam Hussein had operational links with al-Qaeda, so as to have a firm justification for the war.”
the rethugs have been all over the tv spouting the we don’t like torture either, but it’s ancient history bullshit. it was so phuckin’ nauseating. if they think defending cheney is going to expand their base, then let ’em talk until they drop. if they choose cheney as the face of the party, they won’t survive the decade.