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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIs the Media Focusing on the Wrong Senate Torture Report?
The Big Torture Story Everyone Is Missing
The Media Is Focusing On the WRONG Senate Torture Report
While the torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee
is very important, it doesnt address the big scoop regarding torture.
Instead, it is the Senate Armed Services Committees report that dropped the big bombshell regarding the U.S. torture program.
Senator Levin, commenting on a Armed Services Committees report on torture in 2009, explained:
McClatchy filled in important details:
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
When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheneys and Rumsfelds people to push harder, he continued. Cheneys and Rumsfelds people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasnt any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under pressure to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
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 successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq, Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.
I think its obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq), [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. They made out links where they didnt exist.
Levin recalled Cheneys assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
The Washington Post reported the same year:
So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a ticking time bomb scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
MUCH MORE with links to other news sources at.......
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40453.htm
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)To the Greatest Page.
Torture to create propaganda to justify the criminal regime.
This is important. This cuts to the depth of the criminality we are dealing with here.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)Then they want to tell us what constitutes patriotism.
summerschild
(725 posts)woo me with science
(32,139 posts)This was deliberate policy by the government of the United States of America to break bones, rape, and sodomize for the purpose of extracting false confessions for propaganda.
Propaganda directed at us to get us to continue to defend this lying, torturing corporate government's agenda of war for profit.
Bortman33
(102 posts)sociopathic neo-CON "CONservative Propaganda" supported and promulgated by a sycophantic cwhorepoRATe media.
Skrups
(18 posts)We should refer to our representative as our Congressional Sociopath. So many of them are and if there not, they work in sociopathic culture.
BeanMusical
(4,389 posts)Duval
(4,280 posts)KoKo
(84,711 posts)Amazing!
Mustellus
(328 posts)'Murrican bombers are retirement bombers. They expect to be able to bomb and retire in their old age. Timothy McVeigh was a retirement bomber. He used a timer.
Suicide bombers don't use timers......
mountain grammy
(26,623 posts)and the report cites the Wash Post, Detroit News, Truthout, and ABC news among others. It also cites the 9/11 Commission report, a copy of which sits on my bookshelf and I've used it and referenced it many times. This is nothing new and neither is our lack of interest in fixing it.
bigtree
(85,998 posts)..from @emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler)
The Debate about Torture Were Not Having: Exploitation
Published December 8, 2014
As the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on torture (released over 5 years ago, in far less redacted form than tomorrows summary will be) makes clear, the Bush regime embraced torture not for intelligence but for exploitation. In December 2001, when DOD first started searching for what would become torture, it was explicitly looking for exploitation.
As Administration lawyers began to reconsider U.S. adherence to the Geneva Conventions, the DoD Office of the General Counsel also began seeking information on detention and interrogation. In December 2001, the DoD General Counsels office contacted the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, for information about detainee exploitation.
And as a footnote explaining that reference makes clear, interrogation is only one part of the exploitation process.
Some other things exploitation is used for indeed the very things the torture we reverse-engineered for our own torture program was used for are to help recruit double agents and to produce propaganda.
And we have every reason to believe those were among the things all incarnations of our torture were used for. We tortured in Abu Ghraib because we had no sources in the Iraqi resistance and for some reason we believed sexually humiliating men would shame them into turning narcs for the US.
read more: https://www.emptywheel.net/2014/12/08/the-debate-about-torture-were-not-having-exploitation/
related:
Some torture facts.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2014/12/08/some-torture-facts/
KoKo
(84,711 posts)from your post is quite a read. Thanks....I hadn't checked EW in awhile. Still hope Udall will be able to add more info and I've always hoped that former Senator Bob Graham would reveal more of what he knows about "9/11" and the Commission's findings. In an interview with "Real News Network" last year he said he'd put what he could in his fiction books and hoped people could connect the dots...but, he still couldn't reveal more because of his position in the Senate and the oath of secrecy (or whatever it's called) that he had to comply with. He knows more about "9/11" than he can say. Hopefully this all won't go down the Memory Hole with the public once again.
------
Some torture facts.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2014/12/08/some-torture-facts/
proverbialwisdom
(4,959 posts)Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody: "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."
http://www.levin.senate.gov (PDF)
The Wizard
(12,545 posts)immoral.
KingCharlemagne
(7,908 posts)Link to faster-loading (and more nicely formatted) Executive Summary here:
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/pdf/12112008_detaineeabuse.pdf
KoKo
(84,711 posts)Good for those who like to dig into this more than an article.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)"exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar."
And then there were the exploitative TV series and movies starring torture as some sort of great means to save lives. No. It does not save lives. It corrupts the moral fiber of those who implement it and of the people who are fooled into thinking that sadistic cruelty makes them safer.
The use of torture is also a means of intimidating and putting fear into the people who are told the stories of the torture.
Fear silences opposition.
One of the reasons that witches were burned at the stake was to frighten those many people who stood and watched the burnings. "Let this be a lesson to you."
As we can see with ISIS, the torture has not stopped the spread of a very aggressive, insular Islamic fanaticism. It has if anything strengthened that fanaticism.
Torture was not only morally wrong but counterproductive.
Torture-in-our-name is what finally separated me from war-supporting longtime friends who could not be bothered to think. I will hold that against bushCo until Justice.
Mnemosyne
(21,363 posts)malokvale77
(4,879 posts)The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting FALSE confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures waterboarding.
My Uncle died in one of those camps. It tears me up every time I think about what he suffered.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)spanone
(135,844 posts)woo me with science
(32,139 posts)Oilwellian
(12,647 posts)It looks like nauseating but necessary reading. Thank you, Koko. Great post.