Why we torture
May 14, 2009
Abu Zubaydah is tortured by the CIA.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is tortured by the CIA.
“The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.” — George W. Bush
This administration rejects torture. … I don’t think it’s productive, let alone justified.” – John Ashcroft
“We do not torture.” — George W. Bush.
“This government does not torture people … We stick to U.S. law and international obligations.” –George W. Bush
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.”
It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.
“What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.
So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods.” — Lawrence Wilkerson
–WKW
A tortured debate not worth having
May 11, 2009
The year was 1998, and just a couple years following a damaging strike, Major League Baseball was back. Millions of fans went to baseball games and millions of others watched gleefully from home, as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa hit home run after home run, breaking records and jacking up crowds as the media transcribed it all in full orgasmic myopia as to what was actually happening.
That we knew it was all a farce never even entered our mind. Or better said, was self-forced from our minds. Two great guys were hitting homers. Sure, both looked as if they had been assembled in a Terminator factory, but they were nice guys who could hit remarkable home runs and sell milk. They would never cheat. And even if they did, we’d promise to play along by not noticing.
A decade later and everyone notices performance-enhancing drugs, and McGwire and Sosa are looked at as drug kingpins of a game they decided to dominate by injecting themselves with horse tranquilizers and the like. And everyone who stood and cheered McGwire and Sosa’s achievements of 1998 does their best to fool themselves into believing they weren’t complicit.
This episode of Americana comes to mind when seeing the debate over torture in the U.S. Mostly, it struck me full force when watching Shepherd Smith go off on torture apologists on Fox News. And while Smith was deservedly praised for being a man with principles who wouldn’t bend under an avalanche of torture apologists, there was something distinctly kabuki about it all.
Because America tortures. America has tortured for a long, long time. And there’s absolutely no reason for any of us to think otherwise. The proof is all out there, simple to find. Naomi Klein lays it all out for you in the pages of “The Shock Doctrine.”
According to declassified training manuals, SOA students – military and police officers from across the hemisphere – were instructed in many of the same “coercive interrogation” techniques that have since gone to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximise shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food “manipulation”, humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions – and worse. In 1996 President Clinton’s Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned “execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment”.
As does A.J. Langguth in the L.A. Times:
The Brazilian people did not deserve what they got. The military cracked down harshly on labor unions, newspapers and student associations. The newly efficient police, drawing on training provided by the U.S., began routinely torturing political prisoners and even opened a torture school on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to teach police sergeants how to inflict the maximum pain without killing their victims.
One torture victim was Fernando Gabeira, a young reporter for Jornal do Brasil who was recruited by a resistance movement and later arrested for his role in the 1969 kidnapping of Charles Burke Elbrick, the U.S. ambassador. (Elbrick was released after four days.) In custody, Gabeira later told me, he was tortured with electric shocks to his testicles; a fellow prisoner had his testicles nailed to a table. Still others were beaten bloody or waterboarded. When Gabeira’s captors said anything at all, they sometimes boasted about having been trained in the United States.
As does The New Yorker:
Within the first year of the war, news of atrocities by U.S. forces—the torching of villages, the killing of prisoners—began to appear in American newspapers. Although the U.S. military censored outgoing cables, stories crossed the Pacific through the mail, which wasn’t censored. Soldiers, in their letters home, wrote about extreme violence against Filipinos, alongside complaints about the weather, the food, and their officers; and some of these letters were published in home-town newspapers. A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and others called the “water cure.” “Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.”
And on and on. It’s all out there. We as a nation just refuse to see it.
Basically, what’s troubled me most about the so-called “torture debate” is that it’s based on outright falsehoods. Outright falsehoods that Americans are more than willing to ignore in order to maintain the belief that prior to 9/11, the U.S. was an honorable nation that would never stoop to the actions of terrorists. But we have, for a long time. And we will again, if we aren’t doing it right now.
We have allowed the debate on whether America tortures to be streamlined into easy-to-chew-and-feel-ok-about bites: After 9/11, George W. Bush and his administration went rogue, terrified of Islamic Terrorists and willing to do whatever it took to stop them, even torture. And those that did it, or other torture apologists, are just fine with that because they kept us all safe. Those against it are basically hippies that have no clue about the real world.
And here in the real world, Barack Obama is Mark McGwire and Sammy Soma in their prime. The nation is in love with him, and even his critics understand why. He has it, just like 1998′s Bash Brothers. The man can seriously move some milk, so to speak.
But that doesn’t make him any less complicit in covering up a history of torture in America. That doesn’t make him less complicit in the acts of torture that will surely follow, regardless of any laws or edicts he’s signed.
Because while McGwire and Sosa forced the sports world to delay its fight against performance-enhancing drugs, now Obama is forcing the U.S. to put off real debate against the history of torture by the U.S.
The torture charges against the Bush Administration are not some great “we lost our way and must move forward” incident. It was a defining moment of the U.S. showing the world that torture is, in fact, our way. Because the Bush Administration didn’t do anything out of the normal when it comes to using torture against its enemies, real or perceived. They just didn’t take into account for cell-phone cameras.
In the end, it comes down to a final baseball analogy. Because fans of Major League Baseball, and professional sports in general, have a decision to make – Do they work to flush performance-enhancing drugs out of the game, or just look away again.
This is where the “Torture debate” has led us. The time is now to truly research and understand how Americans have long used torture. Or it’s just time to look away again, and keep believing that America is a moral nation, regardless of the evidence against. Because as of now, we are involved in a tortured debate that’s just not worth having.
–WKW
One-Liner: An incompetent CIA
April 30, 2009
Torture apologists have made one thing abundantly clear – they believe the CIA and its interregators are incompetent and unable to do their jobs keeping the nation safe without using torture, regardless of what any memos may say.
–WKW
