Al-Libi Case Eloquent Testimony against Torture
The best refutation of Dick Cheney's insistence that torture was necessary and useful in dealing with threats from al-Qaeda just died in a Libyan prison. See also Andy Worthington.
Al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was captured trying to escape from Afghanistan in late 2001. He was sent to Egypt to be tortured, and under duress alleged that Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda agents in chemical weapons techniques. It was a total crock, and alleged solely to escape further pain. Al-Libi disavowed the allegation when he was returned to CIA custody. But Cheney and Condi Rice ran with the single-source, torture-induced assertion and it was inserted by Scooter Libby in Colin Powell's infamous speech to the United Nations.
If torture can mislead you into launching a war that results in hundreds of thousands of deaths, then it should be avoided, quite apart from the fact that it is illegal and that the United States is signatory to binding treaties specifying its illegality. (It is coming out that Bush-Cheney's own CIA Inspector-General expressed the view that the Bush-era torture was medically unsound, did not produce the desired results, and contravened the UN Convention against torture.
Here is what Condi Rice told the Lehrer News Hour in 2002, based on the torture-induced statements of the late al-Libi:
' "We clearly know that there were in the past and have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of Al Qaeda going back for actually quite a long time," Rice said. "We know too that several of the [Al Qaeda] detainees, in particular some high-ranking detainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to Al Qaeda in chemical weapons development." '
In my book, Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East, I note that Gen. Bonaparte forbade the use of torture by French military interrogators in Cairo, on the grounds that it produced too much misinformation. Napoleon was not exactly squeamish. And even he would have been ashamed of the crew we had in Washington before last January.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/12/2009 12:19:00 AM
|
Facebook
5 Comments:
totally OT: just read the review of your book in the times and my word - a leather jacket!!!! how risque! if you've had that leather jacket the whole time, why didn't you bust that sucker out on the colbert report?? that would've shown that stodgy suit-wearer colbert ;)
sorry i have nothing useful to contribute :)
Cheney on the usefulness and CIA approval of torture: the old 'find the CIA memo's' ploy, eh? Clouseau would be proud. Just publish the memos. Why won't Obama publish the memos??? I'm warning you: Obama is putting the US in danger--danger!!--by not continuing to torture.
Repeat along with those old favorites 'Find the WMD's' (Follow the Drinkin Gourd), 'Saddam the Nasty Dictator' (Puff the Magic General) and 'Follow the Yellowcake Road'. The one story Cheney doesn't tell and that Bush apparently never heard in Kennebunkport is Brer Rabbit and the Tarbaby. Pity.
1) Bush always denied that the US tortures people, pointing out that it is illegal and runs against American values.
2) One of the justifications given by Bush/Blair for invading Iraq was that the Saddam regime tortured people.
3) The Abu Ghraib torture scandal was cited by the Bush/Cheney administration as a major and very damaging setback.
Cheney should be asked whether other countries are entitled to use the same techniques against American prisoners.
The Bush administration was not "misled" into attacking Iraq by false confessions obtained under torture.
Thanks to Juan Cole for "the other side of the fence" commentary. Anyone even remotely familiar with the Vietnam war, would have known that "booby-traps and land-mines" - now intellectualized in the computer-geek era as "I.E.D.s" - would be an effective weapon of a sustained, war-of-attrition insurgency. But of course Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and their entire Dept. of Defense body-snatchers (civilian overlords at the DOD, including Wolfowitz, Feith, and the whole PNAC crew)infamously had no combat experience, including of course Dick Cheney's _5_ Vietnam war draft deferments. (And to think Republicans tried to make Bill Clinton's 1 draft deferment an issue in 1992 and after!)
Even more specifically, Torture as a policy miserably failed in the French imperial occupations of Algeria and Vietnam - where the French were not the least bit squeamish about using torture on a huge scale, indeed, the French Foreign Legion even hired Germans - real Nazi post-WWII stormtroopers (SS) - as both special forces and 'interrogators' (torturers)!
Americans remain willfully ignorant of how we got involved in Vietnam (sucked in to prop up the Catholic puppets in South Vietnam who had ofen sided with the defeated French during the first phase of the Vietnam war) - and, as well, America's long record of outsourcing torture to 'friendly' dictators, whether in Vietnam, South America, the Philippines, etc. Needless to say, in each of those regions, it made American forces less popular, not more so.
Post a Comment
<< Home