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Torture invariably produces results that torturers wish to hear. The best source for verification is the Catholic Inquisition. Almost all the victims tortured by the Catholic Church “confessed” to “cohabitation with the devil” and were subsequently executed by the Church. The Church’s political interests were served by a TERROR CAMPAIGN overseen by sexually perverse, sadistic, priests administering torture to numerous innocent women and some men over a period of hundreds of years. Today we see the absurdity of those ‘confessions,’ nevertheless, at the time such absurdities were ‘realities!’ TORTURE INVARIABLY PRODUCES EXACTLY WHAT THE TORTURERS WISH TO HEAR – sex with the devil yesterday, 9/11 today!
In the attached video Dick Cheney -- unconsciously emulating Inquisition torturers -- openly admits that he authorised torture and that it produced good, “successful” results – the only thing missing is the cowl!
I reiterate that TORTURE is a CRIME and the full force of the LAW must be applied to ALL torturers (psychopaths) in order to preserve our/society’s civilised values and to keep sociopaths off the streets!
(CNN) -- Finding a "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the abusive interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, a former State Department official told CNN on Thursday.
The allegation was included in an online broadside aimed at former Vice President Dick Cheney by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney's office kept close tabs on the questioning.
"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda," Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.
Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said his accusation is based on information from current and former officials. He said he has been "relentlessly digging" since 2004, when Powell asked him to look into the scandal surrounding the treatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
"I couldn't walk into a courtroom and prove this to anybody, but I'm pretty sure it's fairly accurate," he told CNN.
Most of Wilkerson's online essay criticizes Cheney's recent defense of the "alternative" interrogation techniques the Bush administration authorized for use against suspected terrorists. Cheney has argued the interrogation program was legal and effective in preventing further attacks on Americans.
Critics say the tactics amounted to the illegal torture of prisoners in U.S. custody and have called for investigations of those who authorized them.
Representatives of the former vice president declined comment on Wilkerson's allegations. But Wilkerson told CNN that by early 2002, U.S. officials had decided that "we had al Qaeda pretty much on the run."
"The priority had turned to other purposes, and one of those purposes was to find substantial contacts between al Qaeda and Baghdad," he said.
The argument that Iraq could have provided weapons of mass destruction to terrorists such as al Qaeda was a key element of the Bush administration's case for the March 2003 invasion. But after the invasion, Iraq was found to have dismantled its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, and the independent commission that investigated the 2001 attacks found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between the two entities.
Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.
At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.
"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."
Al-Libi's claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. It also was part of Powell's February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war, a speech Powell has called a "blot" on his record.
Al-Libi later recanted the claim, saying it was made under torture by Egyptian intelligence agents, a claim Egypt denies. He died last week in a Libyan prison, reportedly a suicide, Human Rights Watch reported.
Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for the U.S.-based group, called al-Libi's allegation "pivotal" to the Bush administration's case for war, as it connected Baghdad to the terrorist organization behind the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
And an Army psychiatrist assigned to support questioning of suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba told the service's inspector-general that interrogators there were trying to connect al Qaeda and Iraq.
"This is my opinion," Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general's office. "Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
Burney's account was included in a Senate Armed Services Committee report released in April. Other interrogators reported pressure to produce intelligence "but did not recall pressure to identify links between Iraq and al Qaeda," the Senate report states.
Cheney criticized Powell during a television interview over the weekend, saying he no longer considers Powell a fellow Republican after his former colleague endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.
Wilkerson said he is not speaking for his former boss and does not know whether Powell shares his views.
America’s Shame
by Eric Margolis via reed - LewRockwell Monday, May 4 2009, 8:10pm
Nations that use torture disgrace themselves. Armed forces and police that torture inevitably become brutalized and corrupted. "Limited" use of torture quickly becomes generalized. "Information" obtained by torture is mostly unreliable.
I learned these truths over fifty years covering dirty "pacification" wars, from Algeria to Indochina, Central and South America, southern Africa, the Mideast, Afghanistan, and Kashmir in which torture was commonly used.
In spite of all the historical evidence that torture is counterproductive, the Bush administration encouraged torture of anti-American militants (aka "terrorists") after the 9/11 attacks. The full story has not yet been revealed, but what we know so far is revolting and shameful. Britain and Canada were also complicit as they used information derived from torture and handed suspects over to be tortured.
Many Americans and human rights groups are now demanding that the Bush administration officials who employed and sanctioned torture face justice. President Barack Obama hinted his new attorney general, Eric Holder, might investigate this whole ugly business. But the Obama White House clearly wants to dodge this issue.
Republicans, who have become America’s champion of war and torture, are fiercely resisting any investigation, and lauding torture’s benefits. Just when it seemed impossible for the dumbed-down Republican redneck party to sink any lower, it has by endorsing torture as the American way.
So, too, some senior intelligence and Pentagon officials including, dismayingly, Obama’s new CIA chief, Leon Panetta. He should know better. Many senior Congressional Democrats who sanctioned torture, or did nothing to stop it, are equally reluctant that the torture scandal be further investigated.
Torture is a crime under US law. It is a crime under the Third Geneva Convention, and the UN’s Anti-Torture Convention, both of which the US signed. Kidnapping and moving suspects to be tortured in third countries is a crime. Torture violates core American values.
In 1945, the US hanged Japanese officers for inflicting "water-boarding" (near-drowning) on US prisoners, which were deemed war crimes. Yet this is exactly what the CIA inflicted on its Muslim captives. FBI agents rightly refused to participate in the torture of al-Qaeda suspects, warning that it violated US law and could make them subject to future prosecution.
Republicans and even Obama’s intelligence chief, Adm. Dennis Blair, claim some useful information was obtained by torture. That depends on what you call useful. Al-Qaeda is still in business. Osama bin Laden remains at large. Iraq and Afghanistan became monstrous fiascoes costing $1 trillion. US military and intelligence personnel who fall into hostile hands may now face similar tortures.
In 2004, CIA’s inspector general reported there was no proof that use of torture had thwarted "specific imminent attacks." This comes from a recently declassified Justice Department memo.
The director of the FBI, Robert Muller, one of Washington’s most upright, respected officials, also declared that torture had not prevented any attacks against the United States. Both findings directly contradict claims by America’s own Torquemada, Dick Cheney, that torture prevented major attacks.
Torture did not protect America from a second major attack, as Republicans claim. In fact, it appears 9/11 was a one-off event, and al-Qaeda numbered only a handful of extremists to begin with, not the worldwide conspiracy claimed by the White House after it was caught sleeping on guard duty. Bush administration claims about imminent threats from dirty bombs and germ weapons such as anthrax were untrue.
CIA "useful" torture information came from two suspects: Khalid Sheik Mohammed was tortured by near drowning 183 times – six times daily for a month; and Abu Zubaydah, 83 times in August, 2003.
Use a power drill (a favorite "investigative" tool of America’s Iraqi Shia allies) on Dick Cheney, and it would take only minutes to get him to admit he’s Osama bin Laden.
A shocking US Senate report just revealed that after the Bush administration could not find the links it claimed existed between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, it tried, in best Soviet style, to torture its captives to admit that such links did, in fact, exist. That, of course, would have been a much better excuse for invading Iraq than the lies about weapons of mass destruction pointed at America.
The Senate also reported CIA and Pentagon torture techniques were adopted from torture methods North Korea used in the 1950’s to compel American prisoners to confess to lies about germ warfare.
In fact, North Korea learned its torture techniques from Soviet KGB instructors. KGB’s favorite tortures in the 1930’s and 40’s were merciless beatings, confinement in refrigerated cells, week-long sleep deprivation, and endless interrogations. I have seen the torture cells at KGB’s Lubiyanka HQ in Moscow.
The CIA and US military copied these North Korean/Soviet torture methods, but also added contorted positions, and nakedness and humiliation, techniques learned from Israeli interrogators who used them to blackmail Palestinian prisoners into becoming informers. Hence all the naked photos from Abu Ghraib prison.
American doctors and medical personnel supervised torture and devised and supervised techniques to mentally incapacitate prisoners through isolation, terrifying sensory deprivation, and injections of potent psychotropic drugs.
Torture was authorized by President George W. Bush, VP Dick Cheney, Secretaries Don Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, and carried out by CIA chief George Tenet and the Pentagon’s secretive Special Operations Command.
Four lickspittle lawyers and two bootlicking attorney generals provided sophistic legal briefs sanctioning torture. All should be disbarred and face an independent judicial commission. Not a whitewash, like the 9/11 Commission, but a real, independent legal body. Better, send the case to the UN International Court in The Hague.
President Obama actually told CIA personnel that he does not want to prosecute the torturers because they were only following proper legal advice and orders. So did Nazi officials who killed millions.
Nazi lawyers legally dismembered Germany’s Weimar democracy and imposed Nazi dictatorship in only two months after the "terrorist attack" on the Reichstag in Feb. 1933. Imposition of Hitler’s dictatorship followed proper legal channels.
When I served in the US Army, I was taught that any illegal order, even from the president, must be refused and that mistreating prisoners was a crime.
President Obama must show the world that America upholds the law, rejects torture of all kinds, and that no officials are above the law. Otherwise, there is no other way to prevent the recurrence of torture in the future.
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