Please DIGG article Here: http://digg.com/political_opinion/Larisa_Alexandrovna_Did_We_Torture_To_Create_War_On_Terrorhttp://www.atlargely.com/atlargely/2009/05/bush-administration-sins-still-to-come.htmlMay 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.