A Time for Change

This is NOT America

Frank Rich has written a very good Op-Ed piece  on the torture issue.  It touches on many of the aspects of this issue that we have been discussing her for months and especially over the last few months.  A new ABC News poll discussed on MSNBC live, 51% of Americans want an investigation of  Bush era torture. 44% oppose President Obama’s decision to release the torture memos.  But this is the interesting statistic.  48% say that we should nevertheless consider torture in certain cases notwithstanding the plethora of evidence that torture does not work to provide good and reliable intelligence. See this post as just one example.   How about when torture was used to try to get some evidence to buttress the Bush administration claims that there was a link between al Qaeda and Iraq. You can see that post here.  Now, Dick Cheney is scrambling to try to paint the torture in a different light and to support his claims that torture works when it dies not.  He’s an incredible, paranoid loon.  See the Rachel Maddow piece on that is just excellent.

more about “Rachel Maddow video: In Veep Trouble” (please click on link to view video)

Bush, Cheney and gang did not exactly “tolerate dissent” indeed. See here.  Those at the top just destroyed what went against their agenda.  The people at the top should most definitely pay.

That brings us full circle to a post I made exactly one week ago.  We could have and should known about the torture and according to this poll as early as right after 9/11, yet some say we did not know.  At the very least, as Frank Rich wrote “We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.”  So we knew or should have known.  Why the public debate then about the release of these memos revealing the depravity of the Bush administration?  The information was in the public realm.  It’s not like al Qaeda does not monitor our media.

The other thing is that notwithstanding the horrific nature of the torture, there are apparently a good number of us who still want to authorize the commission of war crimes if you believe the poll cited above.  What is wrong with us?  We are OK with war crimes? <wide eyed and horrified in disbelief>

As for the 52% who do not want torture and the 51% who want an investigation into it, you have some sticky issues such as the President talking about whether or not there will be torture prosecutions when he should leave that up to his attorney general.  What happened to not politicizing the Department of Justice.  I’m just sayin’.

Then there is the discussion about whether lower level CIA and DOD personnel should be prosecuted  for war crimes when it is presumed that they were (1) relying on orders and/or direction from above and (2) presumably relying on legal advice from the OLC.  If our intelligence community is ticked off and paranoid, they might not exactly be focusing on our national interests. Think about that.

I think the answer lies in the information that we have, especially now that we have more information that at least some of the rank and file were not in agreement with their “orders” to torture.  In fact, more than a few were very opposed, including a young soldier who was so impacted she committed suicide.  Thanks Skye for that post.  So where does the blame lie because the buck has to stop somewhere?  Frank Rich’s column has the answer.  When you realize WHY the Bush administration was so anxious to torture that they did it before they received the quack memos authorizing it, you realize that they had a mission and the real mission was not uncovering terrorist plots, but find evidence for their dirty little war against Saddam Hussein:

Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.

Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.

By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.

As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”

We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detaineesreleased last week.

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 slam dunk.

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.”

 

If the 51% of you who want investigations are outraged and feel your pulse rising, please know that I am with you.  If we go forward with prosecutions, we need to go forward with the people at the top, the same people who lied to us about the evidence for going to war in Iraq, which led to Bush and Co. having to try to manufacture evidence from torture because there certainly was plenty of credible data that torture does not produce good intelligence.  The only conclusion that we can draw — they didn’t care.  They just wanted something they could point to to cover their backsides.

It is an affront to everythig that this country stands for that Dick Cheney trots himself out of  his hovel to defend himself when there is no defense  for torture. 

The investigations and prosecutions, if a case can be made, should start at the top.  The very top.

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