Truth is always stranger than fiction. As we get to know more and more we learn how truly this was a Faustian bargain. We know that we didn’t get hardly any good intel from torture but torture experts tell us that the victim will saying anything and everything to get it to stop. John McCain named the Green Bay Packers front line and locations that had already been bombed. The same happened when we tortured. Both from the released memos and the leaked ICRC report we know that the One Percent Solution by Suskind was right on the money. How did Suskind’s sources in the CIA describe what Zubaydah was saying?
….Under this duress, Zubaydah told them that shopping malls were targeted by al Qaeda….Zubaydah said banks — yes, banks — were a priority….And also supermarkets — al Qaeda was planning to blow up crowded supermarkets, several at one time. People would stop shopping. The nation’s economy would be crippled. And the water system — a target, too. Nuclear plants, naturally. And apartment buildings.
I remember the crazy color system with all its free floating orange alerts. Now we know that at least part of it was caused by our willingness to torture. This destabilized our economy early this decade which would require more tax cuts in 2003 and deregulation which we are are paying for now.
Then a salon.com piece came out this morning. President Bush put it that we only turned to these techniques in desperation. The Senate Armed Services Committee has found otherwise. Mark Benjamin put it this way [emphasis mine]:
As the report puts it, “The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” The report undercuts the Obama administration’s case for leniency against the CIA, since the agency was pursuing abusive techniques even before Department of Justice lawyers had issued their supposed legal justification for the techniques in August 2002. The report also shows that the administration appears to have attempted to use the abusive techniques to shore up its case for war in Iraq. Interrogators employed the techniques, which are notorious for producing bad intelligence, to get detainees to make statements linking Iraq and al-Qaida.
In the book What Happened Scott McClellan noted that the administration’s obsession from Iraq came not from 9/11 but the Anthrax attacks. We now know that the Anthrax came from our labs and not the Iraqis. McClellan noted the Vice President was utterly convinced there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. What we learned this morning what this obsession drove us to torture. When the detainees merely gave us the names of their accomplises that wasn’t enough. They couldn’t tell us what they didn’t know. Namely, the non-existant connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. It’s also becoming clear that the systemic failure that resulted in the missing WMDs was not as much as an internal CIA problem but coming from a White House that was looking to affirm their presuppositions rather than looking for the truth.
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And yet, Dick Cheney continues to be allowed to spout off all sorts of lies about torture, his reasons for not only condoning, but championing it, and I have to ask…Do Republicans really want this man to speak for them?