Waterboarding Approved Specifically To Justify Iraq War
I have just learnt something which has convinced me that Bush, Cheney and Rice are indeed evil in the sense that Hitler was evil. I did not actually believe that until today.
The excellent and much-respected Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild of the USA and Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has discovered that waterboarding was first approved in July 2002 by Condoleeza Rice, specifically to force confessions of links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein.
Everybody in the intelligence and security worlds knew there were no such links – Bin Laden and Hussein were enemies. Only torture could yield “intelligence” of such links to provide a justification of the invasion of Iraq. There could be no clearer indication that these evil people wished to launch an illegal war of aggression for their other reasons.
If it is not evil to use torture to try to create a pretext for launching aggressive war, then what is evil?
Here is the full text of Marjorie’s article.
When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks I didn’t believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury’s 2005 memos asserted that “enhanced techniques” on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to a newly released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That link was never established.
The Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that Condoleezza Rice approved waterboarding on July 17, 2002 “subject to a determination of legality by the OLC.” She got it two weeks later from Bybee and John Yoo. Rice, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George Tenet reassured the CIA in spring 2003 that the abusive methods were legal.
Team Bush claimed – and still claims – that it had to use harsh techniques to protect us from the terrorists. They really sought to create evidence to rationalize an illegal, unnecessary, and tragic war.
That is absolutely stunning in its implications. How much of this did Blair and Straw also know?
Posted by craig on April 25, 2009 6:00 PM in the category War in Iraq
Comments
Not only does this make the arrest and prosecution of the entire Team Bush the litmus test for Obama’s honesty but it also demands that the House of Commons immediately launch impeachment proceedings against the entire Team Bliar. Unlike America, UK Impeachment can punish ex-officials and can vary the punishment according to the crime and according to the criminal. Bliar himself should get Life Without Parole.
Posted by: Gerard Mulholland at April 25, 2009 6:31 PM
I’ve long been convinced that these people are even worse than Hitler, because whatever else he was, he wasn’t a cretin. They are. The seeds of all that has happened since Bush seized power [in an even more questionable way than Hitler did] are to be found in this document:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
The signatories include some very familiar names. More details about this successful conspiracy – for that is what it is – are here:
http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpWESSEX/Documents/PNAC.htm
When you have digested this information, you will be less surprised that I am convinced 9/11 was an inside job. Waterboarding a few unfortunate captives is small beer by comparison.
I have long regarded Bush and Blair as the modern equivalents of Hitler and Mussolini so far as their political “morality” is concerned.
Posted by: anticant at April 25, 2009 7:10 PM
Craig,
It is initially difficult, isn’t it, to accept the idea that political leaders with smiling faces are capable of pure evil.
Below is an article (from PressTV) about yesterday’s massacres in Iraq of Shia worshipers including Iranian pilgrims. It is just an allegation for now but who can confidently contradict this man.
I attended a middle east ‘Peace Conference’ in London in December 2005. At that time Iranian and some Iraqi politicians were alleging that most of the killings being carried out in Iraq were the work of death squads (Philipino and Mexican mercenaries and the like) and agent-provocateurs coming out of the Green Zone. The called it America’s ‘Salvador option’.
Anyway, here is the article:
The Leader of the Islamic Revolution Seyyed Ali Khamenei has held the US liable for the latest deadly attack on Iranian pilgrims in Iraq.
On Friday, back to back deadly bombings rocked Kazimiyyah, a small town in Baghdad, where two Shia Imam’s lie at rest, killing 60 people, 10 of them Iranians.
The double bombing followed a Thursday blast at a restaurant in the vicinity of Muqdadiya in the restive province of Diyala where another 53 Iranians lost their lives.
“The main suspects in this crime and crimes similar to that are American security and military forces who ruthlessly occupied the Muslim country under the umbrella of ‘war on terrorism’,” Ayatollah Khamenei said on Saturday.
In a statement, the Leader said the US forces “have massacred tens of thousands of people and made the country more insecure on a daily basis.”
“The growth of the poisonous grass of terrorism in Iraq will definitely be written in America’s criminal record and American and Israeli intelligence bodies are the first suspects of that,” Ayatollah Khamenei added.
Bomb attacks and fighting continue to take a heavy toll on Iraq five years after the US-led invasion of the oil-rich country.
A study conducted by ORB — a well-known British polling agency which has been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005 — estimated in September 2007 that 1.2 million Iraqis had been killed in violence-related incidents following the March 2003 invasion of the country.
This is while Human Rights Watch estimates put the number of those killed during a period of twenty years of the reign of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein at 250,000 to 290,000.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=92505§ionid=351020101
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