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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington04292009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington04292009.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">April 29,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>A New Low for
America <br><br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Cheney's Twisted World
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By ANDY
WORTHINGTON <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">S</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>ince the publication last week of the Senate
Armed Services Committee’s report into detainee abuse in Afghanistan,
Iraq and Guantánamo
(<a href="http://armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Detainee%20Report%20Final_April%2022%202009.pdf">
PDF</a>), much has been made of a footnote containing a comment made by
Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist with the Army’s 85th Medical
Detachment’s Combat Stress Control Team, who, with two colleagues, was
“hijacked” into providing an advisory role to the Joint Task Force at
Guantánamo. <br><br>
In his testimony to the Senate Committee, Maj. Burney wrote that “a large
part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between
al-Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link
between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being
able to establish that link … there was more and more pressure to resort
to measures that might produce more immediate results.”<br><br>
In an article to follow, I’ll look at how Maj. Burney -- almost
accidentally -- assumed a pivotal role in the implementation of torture
techniques in the “War on Terror,” but for now I’m going to focus on the
significance of his comments, which are, of course, profoundly important
because they demonstrate that, in contrast to the administration’s
oft-repeated claims that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”
foiled further terrorist attacks on the United States, much of the
program was actually focused on trying to establish links between
al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that would justify the planned invasion of
Iraq.<br><br>
Maj. Burney’s testimony provides the first evidence that coercive and
illegal techniques were used widely at Guantánamo in an attempt to secure
information linking al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, but it is not the first
time that the Bush administration’s attempts to link a real enemy with
one that required considerable ingenuity to conjure up have been
revealed.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Ibn al-Shaykh
al-Libi: the tortured lie that underpinned the Iraq war<br><br>
</b></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>In case anyone has forgotten, when
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the head of the Khaldan military training camp in
Afghanistan, was captured at the end of 2001 and sent to Egypt to be
tortured, he made a false confession that Saddam Hussein had offered to
train two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological
weapons. Al-Libi later recanted his confession, but not until Secretary
of State Colin Powell -- to his eternal shame -- had used the story in
February 2003 in an attempt to persuade the UN to support the invasion of
Iraq.<br><br>
It’s wise, I believe, to resuscitate al-Libi’s story right now for two
particular reasons. The first is because, when he was handed over to US
forces by the Pakistanis, he became the first high-profile captive to be
fought over in a tug-of-war between the FBI, which wanted to play by the
rules, and the CIA -- backed up by the most hawkish figures in the White
House and the Pentagon -- who didn’t. In an article published in the
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact6"><i>
New Yorker</a></i> in February 2005, Jane Mayer spoke to Jack Cloonan, a
veteran FBI officer, who worked for the agency from 1972 to 2002, who
told her that his intention had been to secure evidence from al-Libi that
could be used in the cases of two mentally troubled al-Qaeda operatives,
Zacarias Moussaoui, a proposed 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, and
Richard Reid, the British “Shoe Bomber.”<br><br>
Crucially, Mayer reported, Cloonan advised his colleagues in Afghanistan
to interrogate al-Libi with respect, “and handle this like it was being
done right here, in my office in New York.” He added, “I remember talking
on a secure line to them. I told them, ‘Do yourself a favor, read the guy
his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t.
It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau’s reputation,
if you don’t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is
right.’”<br><br>
However, after reading him his rights, and taking turns in interrogating
him with agents from the CIA, Cloonan and his colleagues were dismayed
when, in spite of developing what they believed was “a good rapport” with
him, the CIA decided that tougher tactics were needed, and rendered him
to Egypt. According to an FBI officer who spoke to
<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/54093"><i>Newsweek</a></i> in 2004,
"At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says,
'You're going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I'm going to find
your mother and I'm going to f*** her.' So we lost that fight.” Speaking
to Mayer, Jack Cloonan added, “At least we got information in ways that
wouldn’t shock the conscience of the court. And no one will have to seek
revenge for what I did.” He added, “We need to show the world that we can
lead, and not just by military might.” <br><br>
In November 2005, the
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/politics/06intel.html"><i>New
York Times</a></i> reported that a Defense Intelligence Agency report had
noted in February 2002, long before al-Libi recanted his confession, that
his information was not trustworthy. As the <i>Times</i> described it,
his claims “lacked specific details about the Iraqis involved, the
illicit weapons used and the location where the training was to have
taken place.” The report itself stated, “It is possible he does not know
any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally
misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for
several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he
knows will retain their interest.” <br><br>
Had anyone asked Dan Coleman, a colleague of Cloonan’s who also had a
long history of successfully interrogating terrorist suspects without
resorting to the use of torture, it would have been clear that torturing
a confession out of al-Libi was a counter-productive exercise. <br><br>
As Mayer explained, Coleman was “disgusted” when he heard about the false
confession, telling her, “It was ridiculous for interrogators to think
Libi would have known anything about Iraq. I could have told them that.
He ran a training camp. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with Iraq.
Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links,
but there weren’t any. The reason they got bad information is that they
beat it out of him. You never get good information from someone that
way.” <br><br>
This, I believe, provides an absolutely critical explanation of why the
Bush administration’s torture regime was not only morally repugnant, but
also counter-productive, and it’s particularly worth noting Coleman’s
comment that “Administration officials were always pushing us to come up
with links, but there weren’t any.” However, I realize that the failure
of torture to produce genuine evidence -- as opposed to intelligence
that, though false, was at least “actionable” -- was exactly what was
required by those, like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz,
“Scooter” Libby and other Iraq obsessives, who wished to betray America
doubly, firstly by endorsing the use of torture in defiance of almost
universal disapproval from government agencies and military lawyers, and
secondly by using it not to prevent terrorist attacks, but to justify an
illegal war.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Where are Ibn
al-Shaykh al-Libi and the other 79 “ghost prisoners”?<br><br>
</b></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>In addition, a second reason for
revisiting al-Libi’s story emerged two weeks ago, when
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/04/21/ten-terrible-truths-about-the-cia-torture-memos-part-one/">
memos approving the use of torture</a> by the CIA, written by lawyers in
the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2005, were
released, because, in one of the memos from 2005, the author, Principal
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury, revealed that a
total of 94 prisoners had been held in secret CIA custody. As I
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/04/23/ten-terrible-truths-about-the-cia-torture-memos-part-two/">
noted at the time</a>, what was disturbing about this revelation was not
the number of prisoners held, because CIA director Michael Hayden
admitted in July 2007 that the CIA had detained fewer than 100 people at
secret facilities abroad since 2002, but the insight that this exact
figure provides into the supremely secretive world of “extraordinary
rendition” and secret prisons that exists beyond the cases of the 14
“high-value detainees” who were transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA
custody in September 2006. <br><br>
Al-Libi, of course, is one of the 80 prisoners whose whereabouts are
unknown. There are rumors that, after he was fully exploited by the
administration’s own torturers (in Poland and, almost certainly, other
locations) and by proxy torturers in Egypt, he was sent back to Libya, to
be dealt with by Colonel Gaddafi. I have no sympathy for al-Libi, as the
emir of a camp that, at least in part, trained operatives for terrorist
attacks in their home countries (in Europe, North Africa and the Middle
East), but if there is ever to be a proper accounting for what took place
in the CIA’s global network of “extraordinary rendition,” secret prisons,
and proxy prisons, then al-Libi’s whereabouts, along with those of the
other 79 men who constitute “America’s Disappeared” (as well as all the
others rendered directly to third countries instead of to the CIA’s
secret dungeons), need to be established.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Torturing Abu
Zubaydah “to achieve a political objective”<br><br>
</b></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Al-Libi’s story is, of course,
disturbing enough as evidence of the utter contempt with which the Bush
administration’s warmongers treated both the truth and the American
public, but as David Rose explained in an article in
<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2008/12/torture200812"><i>
Vanity Fair</a></i> last December, al-Libi was not the only prisoner
tortured until he came up with false confessions about links between
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.<br><br>
According to two senior intelligence analysts who spoke to Rose,
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington04242009.html">Abu
Zubaydah</a>, the gatekeeper for the Khaldan camp, made a number of false
confessions about connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, above
and beyond one particular claim that was subsequently leaked by the
administration: a patently ludicrous scenario in which Osama bin Laden
and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq) were working
with Saddam Hussein to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in
northern Iraq. One of the analysts, who worked at the Pentagon,
explained, “The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was
the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda
had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration
hoped it would be.”<br><br>
However, none of the analysts knew that these confessions had been
obtained through torture. The Pentagon analyst told Rose, “As soon as I
learned that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had
subsided I understood the damage it had done. I was so angry, knowing
that the higher-ups in the administration knew he was tortured, and that
the information he was giving up was tainted by the torture, and that it
became one reason to attack Iraq.” He added, “It seems to me they were
using torture to achieve a political objective.”<br>
<br>
This is the crucial line, of course, and its significance is made all the
more pronounced by the realization that, as one of Bradbury’s torture
memos also revealed, Zubaydah was subjected to
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington02072008.html">
waterboarding</a> (an ancient torture technique that involves controlled
drowning) 83 times in August 2002. The administration persists in
claiming that this hideous ordeal produced information that led to the
capture of
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington07142007.html">Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed</a> and
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2007/09/04/jose-padilla-more-sinned-against-than-sinning/">
Jose Padilla</a>, but we have known for years that KSM was seized after a
walk-in informer ratted on him, and those of us who have been paying
attention also know that, in the case of Padilla, the so-called “dirty
bomber,” who spent three and a half years in solitary confinement in a US
military brig until he lost his mind, there never was an actual “dirty
bomb” plot.
<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2042438.stm">This was
admitted</a>, before his torture even began, by deputy defense secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, who stated, in June 2002, a month after Padilla was
captured, “I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly
loose talk.” <br><br>
All this leaves me with the uncomfortable suspicion that what the
excessive waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah actually achieved -- beyond the
“30 percent of the FBI’s time, maybe 50 percent,” that was “spent chasing
leads that were bullshit,” as an FBI operative explained to David Rose --
were a few more blatant lies to fuel the monstrous deception that was
used to justify the invasion of Iraq.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>A single Iraqi
anecdote, and a bitter conclusion<br><br>
</b></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>It remains to be seen if further
details emerge to back up Maj. Burney’s story. From my extensive research
into the stories of the Guantánamo prisoners, I recall only that one
particular prisoner, an Iraqi named
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/01/26/refuting-cheneys-lies-the-stories-of-six-prisoners-released-from-guantanamo/">
Arkan al-Karim</a>, mentioned being questioned about Iraq. Released in
January this year, al-Karim had been imprisoned by the Taliban before
being handed over to US forces by Northern Alliance troops, and had been
forced to endure the most outrageous barrage of false allegations in
Guantánamo, but when he spoke to the review board that finally cleared
him for release, he made a point of explaining, “The reason they [the US]
brought me to Cuba is not because I did something. They brought me from
Taliban prison to get information from me about the Iraqi army before the
United States went to Iraq.” <br><br>
However, even without further proof of specific confessions extracted by
the administration in an attempt to justify its actions, the examples
provided in the cases of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and Abu Zubaydah should be
raised every time that
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/12/25/the-ten-lies-of-dick-cheney-part-one/">
Dick Cheney</a> opens his mouth to mention the valuable intelligence that
was extracted through torture, and to remind him that, instead of saving
Americans from another terror attack, he and his supporters succeeding
only in using lies extracted through torture to send more Americans to
their deaths than died on September 11, 2001.<br><br>
<b>Andy Worthington</b> is a British historian, and the author of
'<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga">
The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's
Illegal Prison'</a> (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at:
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/">www.andyworthington.co.uk</a>
<br><br>
He can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:andy@andyworthington.co.uk">andy@andyworthington.co.uk</a>
<br><br>
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