Waterboarding Approved Specifically To Justify Iraq War

[Seshmeister]

Craig Murray - Waterboarding Approved Specifically To Justify Iraq War (http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/waterboarding_a.html)

April 25, 2009
Waterboarding Approved Specifically To Justify Iraq War

I have just learnt something which has convinced me that Bush, Cheney and Rice are indeed evil in the sense that Hitler was evil. I did not actually believe that until today.

The excellent and much-respected Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild of the USA and Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has discovered that waterboarding was first approved in July 2002 by Condoleeza Rice, specifically to force confessions of links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein.

Everybody in the intelligence and security worlds knew there were no such links - Bin Laden and Hussein were enemies. Only torture could yield "intelligence" of such links to provide a justification of the invasion of Iraq. There could be no clearer indication that these evil people wished to launch an illegal war of aggression for their other reasons.

If it is not evil to use torture to try to create a pretext for launching aggressive war, then what is evil?

Here is the full text of Marjorie's article.



When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks I didn’t believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury’s 2005 memos asserted that “enhanced techniques” on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to a newly released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That link was never established.

The Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that Condoleezza Rice approved waterboarding on July 17, 2002 “subject to a determination of legality by the OLC.” She got it two weeks later from Bybee and John Yoo. Rice, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George Tenet reassured the CIA in spring 2003 that the abusive methods were legal.

Team Bush claimed - and still claims - that it had to use harsh techniques to protect us from the terrorists. They really sought to create evidence to rationalize an illegal, unnecessary, and tragic war.

Craig Murray
Writer and broadcaster

Craig Murray is a Scottish dissident, human rights
activist, writer, and former British Ambassador. He is
currently Rector of the University of Dundee and an
Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Lancaster
School of Law.

[Nickdfresh]

I've heard her interviewed on NPR. She really knows her stuff and I can verify much of what she says (historically from the 1990s era) in regards to torture. Mainly, the US derived its torture techniques from studies done from the Korean War period to end of the Cold War on why US POWs tended to break and sign confessions in captivity...

It was pretty nauseating to hear how the US, specifically under that cunt Rumsfled, used research designed to train US personnel to defensively minimize the impact of their torture and actively use it to begin torture programs. Fundamentally, these programs missed the point that torture was of questionable effectiveness at gaining valuable intelligence information at best; and torture was only really effective at coaxing "confessions" for propaganda value...

Hardly any help at all in the War on Terrah, when you're not trying to get confessions for propaganda value, but are trying to get information and evidence for convictions that can't be used at real trials now. These people are not only evil, they're fucking retarded incompetents that can't see past their noses and seem only barely just capable of beating monkeys in a football-fucking-contest...

[Seshmeister]

One tortured lie: that’s all it took for war | Andrew Sullivan - Times Online (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article6168270.ece)

The Sunday Times
April 26, 2009


One tortured lie: that’s all it took for war
Bush needed ‘evidence’ and used techniques designed to produce lies to get it


Andrew Sullivan

After the past two weeks of document-dumps – from the leaked February 2007 Red Cross report calling George W Bush’s interrogation policy unequivocally “torture”, to the Office of Legal Counsel “torture memos” released by Barack Obama 10 days ago, to the doorstopper armed services committee report, what do we know about the Bush-Dick Cheney programme for interrogating terror suspects that we did not know before?

Not much in the essentials. In fact, what’s remarkable is how solid the story has stayed from its beginnings six years ago. Nobody now disputes the following: after 9/11, President Bush secretly suspended the Geneva conventions for prisoners captured in the war on terror. The prison camp at Guantanamo Bay – under the jurisdiction of neither Havana nor Wash-ington – was picked to find a legal loophole to permit the torture of prisoners.

The techniques included multiple beatings; total sensory deprivation; keeping suspects awake for weeks on end; keeping prisoners on the edge of medical hypo-thermia and extreme heat; stress positions that make a human being buckle under muscular distress and pain; and religious, sexual, cultural and psychological abuse. Bush and Cheney also added waterboarding, long classified as torture in American and international law.

All of this was reiterated in numbing and often disturbing bureaucratic language. Yes, this is how banal evil looks in modern America. But one small detail did leap out of the footnotes. They waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times; and they waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times. They then destroyed the tapes of these sessions.

What is it about the specificity of the number? Perhaps it helps people to see through the Orwellian language – “enhanced interrogation” – to the act itself. You immediately ask yourself: what was it like to strap a man to a waterboard and make him feel as if he is drowning for the 75th time? As soon as you are forced to understand that this act of torture was directly monitored by the president of the United States, you can’t look away. And the defenders of the policy, sensing the psychological impact of this fact, immediately shifted. Cheney segued effortlessly from saying “we don’t torture” to saying “it worked”. Karl Rove tweeted: “Precautions taken 2 guarantee compliance w/ federal prohibition on torture. U might characterise diligence as overcautious.”

Yes, they tortured and then ordered up transparently absurd legal memos to say they hadn’t. When Philip Zelikow, Condi Rice’s key aide, wrote a memo saying explicitly that this was torture and illegal, they did not just ignore him but, according to Zelikow last week, sought to collect and destroy all copies of his memo.

The second startling revelation was confirmation that Zubaydah, the first prisoner to be tortured, was judged by the CIA and FBI to have told everything he knew before Bush and Cheney ordered the 83 waterboardings. Why did they order the torture? An FBI interrogator of Zubaydah broke ranks to tell The New York Times “there was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics”.

What did the Bush administration gain from torturing Zubaydah? As David Rose reported in Vanity Fair magazine last year, the result of the torture was a confession by Zubaydah that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda had a working relationship, the key casus belli for the Iraq war. Rose quotes a Pentagon analyst who read the transcripts from the interrogation: “Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and Al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.”

That analyst did not then know that the evidence was procured through torture. “As soon as I learnt that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done,” the analyst says.

The president used this tortured evidence to defend the war, alongside the confession of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was cited by Colin Powell at the United Nations as a first-person source of the Saddam-Al-Qaeda connection. But al-Libi was also tortured. And we know that such an operational connection did not exist. And we also now know that what Zubaydah and al-Libi provided were false confessions, procured through torture techniques designed by the communist Chinese to produce false confessions. In other words, the first act of torture authorised by Bush gave the United States part of the false evidence that it used to go to war against Saddam.

The problem with torture is the enormous damage it does to the possibility of finding the truth. Torture forces a victim to tell his interrogator anything to stop the pain. There may be some truth in the confession but there is also untruth – and no way to tell the two apart. Every experienced interrogator knows this, which is why governments that are concerned with getting at the truth do not use it.

The British government processed and interrogated more than 500 Nazi spies during the second world war in a situation in which the very existence of Britain as a free country was at stake and when Londoners endured a 9/11 every week during the blitz. But not one of the spies was physically coerced. Not just because it would have been immoral and illegal, because giving in to torture was not morally different from surrendering to Nazism, but because it would have produced false leads, dead ends and fantasies. The reason totalitarian states use the torture techniques that Bush did is to produce false confessions to create a reality that buttresses their ideology.

The Bush and Cheney ideology was that Iraq needed to be invaded because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda that put America under an intolerable risk. When the facts could not be found to defend that idée fixe, they skewed the intelligence. When there was no intelligence to skew, they tortured people to get it.

Or, to put it more simply: on March 27, 2007, when Zubaydah went before his combatant status review tribunal at Guantanamo, the judge asked him: “So I understand that, during this treatment, you said things to make them stop and then those statements were actually untrue. Is that correct?”

Zubaydah replied: “Yes.” This is partly how the entire war was justified: on a tortured lie. And this much we now know for sure.

[Seshmeister]

They can't just leave it like this - if they won't prosecute these people they should at least have a public inquiry calling them all as witnesses.

[FORD]

If we do not prosecute the BCE, then we owe Hitler and Milosevic apologies. It's as simple (and sickening) as that.

[Nickdfresh]

What is it about the specificity of the number? Perhaps it helps people to see through the Orwellian language – “enhanced interrogation” – to the act itself. You immediately ask yourself: what was it like to strap a man to a waterboard and make him feel as if he is drowning for the 75th time?

Right. They just tortured the cunt until he told them what they wanted to hear. The interrogators probably even coached and cued him into making false links...

And yes, they should be publicly embarrassed and hounded at the very least...

[Dr. Love]

Something doesn't click between Obama saying "I want to look forward, not back" and all these memos come out which is specifically out of alignment with that statement.

To me, it seems like they felt like going after the Bush Administration originally would have been politically difficult and galvanizing, so they release all these memos to force republicans to abandon the former administration or fall on their swords to defend what they did.

To me it seems incredibly politically calculated and manipulative and the idea of it being illegal and reprehensible, while true (and they should have been investigated/prosecuted all along), is simple subterfuge for the real intent -- further damaging and marginalizing the GOP.

Impressive political manuevering. Not sure this is what people thought the Obama people meant when they claimed they wanted to change how politics are done in Washington though. :)

[Nickdfresh]

Something doesn't click between Obama saying "I want to look forward, not back" and all these memos come out which is specifically out of alignment with that statement.

To me, it seems like they felt like going after the Bush Administration originally would have been politically difficult and galvanizing, so they release all these memos to force republicans to abandon the former administration or fall on their swords to defend what they did.

To me it seems incredibly politically calculated and manipulative and the idea of it being illegal and reprehensible, while true (and they should have been investigated/prosecuted all along), is simple subterfuge for the real intent -- further damaging and marginalizing the GOP.

Impressive political manuevering. Not sure this is what people thought the Obama people meant when they claimed they wanted to change how politics are done in Washington though. :)

But maybe the GOP deserves its own, self-imposed marginalization based on the rubber stamp they gave to Bush between 2001 and 2006. They abdicated their responsibility to be a check on the power of the executive branch and they should indeed suffer for the "Freedom Fries" and "the terra-ists is gonna git us" mentality they sowed...

[Blaze]

Even if it was nowhereskazahsian, one country (outside the USA) should at least record this as a complaint to the Hague. :(