Again with the Torture.

Every so often, there's a news article that makes me glad I have a blog and sorry it's not more widely read, because the article so badly deserves to be read.

This is one such article.

The article describes torture and extraordinary rendition. Not as abstracts or theoreticals, but in ways that we're actually doing it, and not in some philosophical way but in a way that gives lie to much of the official story we're given.

It has everything, specific techniques used, proof that the information garnered via torture isn't worth anything and a pretty good indication that the “extraordinary rendition” program supposedly shut down when our “high profile” detainees were moved to Guantanamo Bay is still going on.

Read the whole article, but here are some highlights.

In this secret facility known to prisoners as "The Hangar" and believed to be at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, al Libi told fellow "ghost prisoners," one recalled to me for a PBS "Frontline" to be broadcast tonight, an incredible story of his treatment over the previous two years: of how questioned at first by Americans, by the FBI and then CIA, of how he was threatened with torture. And then how he was rendered to a jail cell in Egypt where the threats became a reality.

In his book, officially cleared for publication, Tenet confirms how the CIA outsourced al Libi's interrogation. He said he was sent to a third country (inadvertently named in another part of the book as Egypt) for "further debriefing."

A prisoner in our custody, confirmed by the CIA, is rendered to a secret site where we know that prisoner will be tortured. It doesn't make me feel any better about our country that we ourselves didn't actually do the torturing. When the Romans threw Christians to lions, it did not remove any of the guilt because the Romans didn't do any of the rending, killing or eating of the flesh.

Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons. This evidence was used by Colin Powell at the United Nations a year earlier (February 2003) to justify the war in Iraq. ("I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al Qaeda," Powell said. "Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.")

But now, hearing how the information was obtained, the CIA was soon to retract all this intelligence. A Feb. 5 cable records that al Libi was told by a "foreign government service" (Egypt) that: "the next topic was al-Qa'ida's connections with Iraq...This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story."

So, one of the prime rationales for the Iraq war, a war which has consumed a significant fraction of a trillion dollars, thousands of American lives and tens or hundreds of thousands of damaged American troops (to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, according to some estimates) was based on false information obtained under torture.

This is one of the strongest arguments against torture. Not only is it abhorrent, illegal and completely against what we stand for as a nation, but it doesn't even work, meaning that there isn't even a legitimate “ends justifying the means” argument to be made in its favor. This can't even be framed as a “being willing to do what we must to bad people in order to keep America safe” argument, because far from being safer, that false information and other similarly disproved information formed the basis for a war which has cost us heavily in money, in lives, in lost world good-will and in future terrorism from another generation of children who will grow up believing that there is no higher purpose than to martyr themselves in glorious attacks against us for our war against Islam.

It doesn't matter if it's true. A man I used to work for used to say that we at that company delivered products, but we SOLD stories. Our product had to be good quality to keep the customers, but we could have the best product in the world and if we couldn't tell a compelling story about it (or if our competitors could tell a convincingly compelling story against it), we'd never sell any.

The same is true here. It doesn't matter if our motives are truly pure and just badly executed or not, if the appearance is that we're at war against Islam (an appearance that will not be helped by invading a second Islamic country that had nothing to do with the events of 9/11), that's what will inspire a generation of future Jihadists, the next generation of Osama bin Ladens.

Al Libi indicated that his interrogators ... "placed him in a small box approximately 50cm X 50cm [20 inches x 20 inches]."  ... for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, al Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to "tell the truth." When al Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al Libi claimed that "he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back." Al Libi told CIA debriefers that he then "was punched for 15 minutes." (Sourced to CIA cable, Feb. 5, 2004).

Seventeen hours in a 20 inch by 20 inch box. Just imagine it.

Although there have been claims about torture inflicted on those rendered by the CIA to countries like Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Uzbekistan, this is the first clear example of such torture detailed in an official government document.

The information came almost one year before the president and other administration members first began to confirm the existence of the CIA rendition program, assuring the nation that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture." (New York Times, Jan. 28, 2005)

So by all accounts, we did it, and then were assured by those who did it that “we don't do that”. And people wonder why I don't trust anything that comes out of the Executive branch these days.

And finally:

Meanwhile, al Libi, who told fellow prisoners in Bagram he was returned to U.S. custody from Egypt on Nov. 22, 2003, has disappeared. He was not among the "high-value prisoners" transferred to Guantanamo last year.

So apparently the much touted transfer of the ghost prisoners to Guantanamo was a PR move only. They moved a few, publicly, so that they could lend credence to the idea that they had stopped the questionable program. But if this article is true, where is al Libi today? And if we don't know the answer to that, who knows what's being done to him today, or what further false information he may be giving that we're continuing to act on as if it were true?

And, one has to wonder, does it even matter to the Administration that it isn't true, or is it more important to have a steady stream of plausible sounding information on false plots that we can scare the populace with by claiming to have “uncovered” and “defeated” them than to actually have good, actionable, TRUE intelligence that might actually keep our nation safer.

Liam.