http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/14/AR2008101403331.html?nav=hcmodule
The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.
http://dennisloo.blogspot.com/2008/04/bush-admits-approving-torture.html
From Dennis Loo:
Bush Admits Approving Torture
When you are trying to acclimate a people to a new normal – in this case, the new normal means routine torture, with international law, and the law more generally, all subject to subordination and disregard as “military necessity” dictates – you start out by denying that you would even think of doing such terrible, illegal things as torture. For a long time, Bush claimed that he had approved an “alternative set of procedures” that were not, heaven forbid, torture, but that the exact details he couldn’t reveal because it would give aid and comfort to the enemy. He assured the American people that all the relevant laws and procedures were being safeguarded. Remember his famous lines? “We do not torture.”
As time goes on, you carefully and progressively build the case for justifying extreme measures. Eventually, you shift from denying that you’re doing these things to admitting that you’re doing it, but, as Schwarzenegger’s character in the film True Lies admits to his wife, yes, I have killed some people, “but they were all bad.” This is now what has happened.
The moment we are now in is critical because the cat’s now definitively out of the bag – it’s now been admitted in full view in mainstream media – and the question before us is whether we will permit this or fight these war criminals and drive them from office. There will be those that say, “Oh, but Zubaydah was a bad man and you have to do these things to get information out of them.” People accept such logic are showing us three things.
First, they are demonstrating their utter credulity to the outrageous fictions of proven liars.
Second, they are demonstrating their inability to judge the overall direction of events. Today our government is torturing Arabs and converts to Islam (such as American citizen Jose Padilla). Tomorrow, our government will be torturing more Americans and anyone else they can stick the terrorist label on.
Third, they are demonstrating their narrow-minded national chauvinism, concluding that it is OK to torture others as long as it supposedly makes them safer.
What kind of people are we really? How will history judge us?
History will not be kind to those who say that they did not act because they were relying upon the Democrats to do something or that they waited for months and months hoping that a new president in 2009 would stop these practices.
History will ask: why did you remain silent? You knew. You had a moral responsibility to act and you didn’t. You cannot hide behind the inactions of those you expected to do the right thing. You are responsible, not the complicit Democrats and the complicit mass media. You.
The story from ABC News below incorrectly states that Abu Zubaydah gave up important information after being watertortured. The truth is something else. As New York Times reporter Ron Suskind says, Zubaydah was a low-level operative with nothing of real value to reveal.
From Jason Leopold’s 12/19/07 article entitled: Chertoff Concealed Role in Tape Destruction:
In his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” author Ron Suskind said Zubaydah was not the “high value detainee” the CIA had claimed. Rather, Zubaydah was a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates and their families, Suskind says.
Abu Zubaydah’s captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about terrorist operations or impending plots. That realization was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes.
But Bush portrayed Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.
“And, so, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures” to get Zubaydah to talk, Bush said in the spring of 2002, after Zubaydah was captured.
Suskind writes that Zubaydah became one of the first prisoners in the wake of 9/11 to undergo some of the harshest interrogation methods at the hands of American intelligence officials.
Suskind says that, despite the fact that Bush was briefed by the CIA about Zubaydah’s low-level al-Qaeda status, the president did not want to “lose face” because he had stated his importance publicly.
“Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”
Zubaydah was strapped to a waterboard and, fearing imminent death, he spoke about a wide range of plots against a number of US targets, such as shopping malls, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. Yet, Suskind writes, the information Zubaydah had provided under duress was not credible.
Still, that did not stop “thousands of uniformed men and women [who] raced in a panic to each … target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
But of course to comprehend the scope of what has occurred is to remember we are talking about more than water torture. Officially sanctioned or tolerated “enhanced interrogation techniques” have included threats of violence against prisoners’ families, mock execution, sexual humiliation, exposure to extreme noise, heat and cold, sensory and sleep deprivation, beatings and electrocution. Scores were literally tortured to death–murdered.
http://brokenlives.info/?page_id=69
If the sadism of a “few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib was official policy all along, a culturally studied psychological operation against the “enemy”, what does it mean that the top officials of the current US regime have admitted to authorizing torture in violation of their Oaths of Office, US Constitutional and International Law and yet they remain in power? What does it mean that only a small chorus of Congressional voices have demanded their impeachment and prosecution, or that the corporate media continue to ”spin” these high crimes as defensible departures from the moral norm in the name of the “War on Terror” when they mention them at all?
If the essence of fascism consists in the acclimation of the public to moral abasement in exchange for promises of protection and “security” (precisely the relationship between a prostitute and her pimp), in what 21st Century Oceania do we live where this exchange can take place in the White House press room?
Is Helen Thomas really the only member of the White House Press Corp who perceives reality and is properly outraged in response, or are the other “journalists” present merely too compromised and cowardly to challenge the mouthpiece of a regime whose criminality is self-evident?
A nation of Dana Perinos might well deserve its debasement and demise.
There is no statute of limitations on torture or murder. Come January, demand justice or surrender your Republic–and your humanity–once and for all.
