Larisa Alexandrovna: 'Did We Torture Prisoners To Create Enemy We Needed To Justify Endless War?'

[Hissyspit]

Please DIGG article Here: http://digg.com/political_opinion/Larisa_Alexandrovna_Did_We_Torture_To_Create_War_On_Terror

http://www.atlargely.com/atlargely/2009/05/bush-administration-sins-still-to-come.html

May 17, 2009

"Bush administration sins still to come"

Frank Rich, the brilliant word-maestro that he is, explains rather well why Obama's "high ambitions" and plans of "moving forward" won't succeed:

"TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions."

And here is something that I think is important to remember:

"These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come."

<snip>

"There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy."

When I think of Bush administration "sins still to come" I have actually considered a possibility I have rarely even alluded to in public. Let me start by pointing out what we now know - also from Rich's column:

"A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention."

In 2005 I had a CENTCOM document leaked to me, which outlined the following:

"More than 13,000 being held by coalition in Iraqi prisons; Less than 2% have been convicted As more and more Iraqis have been detained and released, the insurgency has intensified. The number detained has more than doubled in the last year and a half; the number of attacks has also more than doubled over the same period.

By Larisa Alexandrovna

Recent documents leaked to RAW STORY reveal that as of Nov. 8, coalition forces in Iraq held 13,514 in Iraqi prisons. The documents also reveal the grim landscape of Iraq’s internment system, in which just two percent of those detained been convicted. A UN report has confirmed the basic figures.

A slide created by Detainee Operations at US Central Command (CENTCOM), provided to RAW STORY, reveals that 13,514 detainees are currently held inside coalition-run internment camps throughout Iraq. The figure represents a huge spike from March 2004 – when just 5,673 were reported held, according to a source familiar with the documents.

<snip>

The combined figures of those detainee in both Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 is upwards of 70,000.

According to CENTCOM sources, the Central Criminal Court of Iraq has so far held 684 ‘Coalition trials’ involving 1,259 security detainees, in which a total of only 636 detainees were convicted. Sources say that in total more than 21,000 detainees have been released from Iraq internment facilities.

The CENTCOM slide contains a graphical breakdown of each camp and its detainee population. Included in this count are Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, Camp Cropper, Fort Suse and Camp Ashraf. Other, less known camps are not included in this count, including Al-Kazimiyah and Al-Nasiriyah. Sources familiar with US detention camps also point to an alleged facility at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as an installation on the USS Baton. Raw Story has been unable to confirm facilities at these two locations."

Now remember, we were torturing and then quietly releasing most of these detainees. Why? Moreover, while there is enough evidence to conclude that Bush administration torture policies were in some instances used for eliciting false confessions, there are still other detainees who were tortured for reasons I don't fully understand. Consider the number of detainees given in the the 2005 CENTCOM slide?

Consider too that we now can say without reservation that the "war on terror" was a fiction. We did not go into Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, the two countries with the most connection to the attacks of 9/11. Instead, we went into Iraq, based on lies - willfully cooked and tortured out of detainees. The Iraq war was so important to Bush and Cheney that they literally committed high crimes and possibly treason to achieve it and used the propaganda of the "war on terror” to sell it. Why?

Again, look at the CENTCOM numbers and explain to me how it is possible that we captured this many "terrorists" when there are not this many terrorists (at least prior to Bush's 8 year crime spree) in the world to begin with? If only 2% were tried and convicted, what happened to the rest? Let us even assume that only a few thousand were detained for a longer period of time, tortured, and then released, why so many? It does not require that many people to be tortured into a false confession. A handful is enough.

So if we have a faux "war on terror" does it not follow that such a war should have a faux "terrorist" army we are at war with? I think you can see where I am going with this and this idea has haunted me. To make the question very clear, let me restate it more simply:

Did we torture and release prisoners in order to radicalize them and create the enemy army we needed to justify an endless "war on terror?"

To consider this possibility even in passing is like experiencing a slow mental bleed, but now considering that this set of crimes could in fact be likely is the loss of hope and faith in everything that I thought this country stood for.

I think you can understand why I have been so reluctant to publicly discuss this theory. I have had trouble just considering it because of my strong faith in the good of my country. I don't know if and how this could be proved, but the circumstantial evidence is starting to point in this unavoidably horrific direction.

[Joanne98]

1. YES

[SalviaBlue]

2. Yes

[bottomtheweaver]

3. Yes, but I have to conclude that the main reason we did it

was because it was something "we" (Junior) wanted to do. Why, I'll leave to the judge to figure out. All the other reasons, official and otherwise, including fake intel, don't amount to a hill of beans, although this is a pretty compelling one. I just don't think it had that effect, because most of the guys we tortured appear to have been ordinary citizens who, if they survived, chalked up their experience to bum luck. I could be wrong though.

[The_Commonist]

4. Things that make you go...

"Duh!"

[glitch]

5. Every top corporation has a plan to increase demand.

These corporate war machine sociopaths have simply taken good business practices to their logical conclusion.

:sarcasm:

[Kaleko]

8. Yep. Naomi Klein called it Disaster Capitalism.

But it's not a new idea and it didn't start in the last 8 years. In Germany, I've heard the term "Heuschrecken Kapitalismus" for decades already. It means locust capitalism.

Step 1) Release a swarm of trained locusts on a company or nation.

2) Create laws that allow them destroy whatever structure is viable there.

3) Rebuild according to standards that make the most profits for locust capitalists.

Repeat everywhere ad infinitum...

or until there's nothing left to destroy.

[glitch]

9. Very interesting! Locust capitalism certainly describes them perfectly.

Our species has long been plagued by those among us willing to loot and pillage, to the point where the hosts are destroyed and "new worlds" are required.
I suppose they may serve some kind of evolutionary advantage to our species as a whole, but frankly I don't see their value. Other than as examples of evil, or what not to be. Possibly an incentive to keep evolving?

[Kaleko]

11. Great question. What are parasites good for?

I'm thinking parasites serve a dual purpose. They either force an organism to evolve by developing better immune responses, or they ensure the extinction of a species that can't resist the onslaughts of parasites.

Locust Capitalists also render a service to society in the sense that they force ordinary citizens to develop better social value systems than simple "Might Is Right." If a nation wants to survive, its people have to muster the social and cultural will to enforce regulations that keep the locusts from destroying entire ecosystems.

The US is just beginning to unmask the bigotry behind which parasites have been able to hide their activities for maybe a hundred years or more.

[glitch]

12. I guess we'll find out if our body is healthy enough to fight and survive.

I think we've hit on the best analogy for what they are and how we should deal with them. :hi:

[Hubert Flottz]

6. Karl needed a "War President" to win in 2004 and he needed

to make sure he still had a war!

I knew the torture was due to politics...at the time there were no WMD to be found, Saddam was still on the loose, there was still no proven Iraqi/9/11 connection, Bush had started campaigning and the neoCons needed some fast answers. The political pressure was on, so the BushNazis turned to torture and insanity.

[opihimoimoi]

7. BIZZARE CONVOLUTION OF WAR GONE WILD...The Lie Spiral eventually implodes as demanded by MATH

[Solly Mack]

10. K&R

[OneGrassRoot]

13. ding, ding, ding. K&R n/t

[babylonsister]

14. I don't know. So many boneheaded decisions were made by

the previous admin, I do wonder who would have had the foresight. They sure didn't when planning to get their war on.

[Canuckistanian]

15. Of course

Remember all those photos with the "thumbs up" sign? That's a rude gesture meaning "fuck you" in Iraq.

There's been some speculation that the photos were to be shown to local Iraqis, either to intimidate them or more likely, to enrage them.

It seemed to have worked.

[bluesmail]

16. I believe Iraq is an experiment in terror. What wars aren't? It's also an unwilling participant

game of chess. Chess. The next best move. Walking a tightrope. Thank you lalarawraw for reminding us of Diego Garcia. With all the 'news' happening it's difficult to keep up. It's brilliant AND criminal to keep these Iraqi's in prison and then release them into an already volatile culture that we *(not)* created. There's nothing like an old-fashioned civil war *for profit* kind of like our Health Care *for profit*.

[wuvuj]

18. Like the "civil war" currently....

...being fomented in Afghanistan/Pakistan? Probably why Pakistan has resisted having the "war on terror" fought in their country?

What's going to be real funny is when Americans realize that all these techniques and tech can be used on them...in fact some probably were during the previous 2 elections.

[Wednesdays]

17. K&R

:kick:

[Usrename]

19. There ya go.

It is more likely than not that the false confessions which were obtained through torture were elicited in order to obscure the identity of the real person(s) behind the 9/11 attacks.

It is extremely likely that the whole torture as a justification for war is also just another ruse.

Torture fits much better with the rest of the actions which were taken in order to implement the 9/11 coverup.

Everyone that has been paying attention knows, deep down they know, that the whole official 9/11 story is fabricated.

I think as the country awakens from this nightmare, somehow the people can intuit the truth about 9/11 and the perpetrators, and they are beginning to put the pieces together, including this new revelation about using torture in order to try and pin the blame on Saddam and Iraq.

[elleng]

20. As to 'endless war,'

there's more pre-9/11 evidence.

'In May 1991, according to Clark, he dropped in for a conversation with Wolfowitz, then the third-ranking civilian in the Pentagon, to congratulate him on the success of the Gulf War.
"We screwed up and left Saddam Hussein in power. The president believes he'll be overthrown by his own people, but I rather doubt it," he quotes Wolfowitz lamenting. "But we did learn one thing that's very important. With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity. The Soviets won't come in to block us. And we've got five, maybe 10, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower emerges to challenge us ... We could have a little more time, but no one really knows."

More than a decade and a half later, the neoconservative obsession with regime change persists and flourishes in the upper reaches of the Bush administration, where Vice President Dick Cheney is reportedly pressing for action against Iran. (Of course, by overthrowing Saddam and putting the Shiites in control of Iraq, Cheney and President Bush have already done more to empower Tehran than the ruling mullahs could ever have imagined in their fondest fantasies.) The stated reasons range from Iran's suspected sponsorship of attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq to its worrisome pursuit of nuclear power, but Clark's allegations strongly suggest American policymakers chose war years ago, no matter what Tehran ended up doing.'

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/27683

and

http://stevensonblog.tuscaloosanews.com/default.asp?item=253924

[pleah]

21. Yes.

K&R

[Vidar]

22. We have a winner.