The was probably the most deliberately political song from my solo cd from 2008, because it is talking quite directly about George W. Bush and his tendency for double-talk and lies.
Obviously, he put us into war in Afghanistan and Iraq - using false reports of “weapons of mass destruction” to excuse the action. If you actually followed the detailed news at the time you would have discovered that most of the key intelligence from detainees was obtained by FBI Agent Ali Soufan before the SERE team torturers were brought into use at Gitmo and various Black Sites. Soufan had used tried and true techniques of building empathy to get accurate information, and it was using this that he was able to get Abu Zubaydah to reveal the identity of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed.
Soufan interviewed by Frontline.
Well, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we finally responded, swiftly, against Al Qaeda and Taliban. However, unfortunately, we never finished the job, because we decided to go and invade another country that had nothing to do with 9/11. And because we wanted to do that, we started to implement techniques that are so un-American, some things that totally contradict with the mission of spreading values and human rights and democratic principles around the globe. We started to torture people so they can tell us that Saddam and bin Laden are working together; that Saddam have a WMD program. We created something called the dark sites. We started with Guantanamo Bay.
We were writing countries in our State Department human rights reports for waterboarding, for sleep deprivation, for actually doing the same exact thing that we as the United States government were doing at the same time. We lost our values. And we are still dealing with the consequences of this until today.
The FBI was getting good and valid information from Abu Zubaydah and eventually KSM. The question that hasn’t been asked is - “Why did they then decide to bring in the torturers?”
Prasow was astonished a second time three weeks later when Majid Khan, a former al-Qaida courier also held in Guantánamo, became the first person to speak openly in court about the torture he suffered at a CIA black site.
Khan’s description of being waterboarded, held in the nude and chained to the ceiling to the point that he began to hallucinate was so overpowering that seven of the eight members of his military jury wrote a letter pleading for clemency for him, saying his treatment was a “stain on the moral fiber of America”.
The ground does appear to be shifting, and as it does attention is once again falling on one of the great unfinished businesses of the 21st century: the US torture program. In the panicky aftermath of 9/11, when the world seemed to be imploding, the CIA took the view that the ends – the search for actionable intelligence to thwart further terrorist attacks – justified any means.
With the enthusiastic blessing of the justice department and George W Bush’s White House, the CIA abandoned American values and violated international and US laws by adopting callous cruelties that they consciously copied from the enemy.
They took one prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, and made him their experimental guinea pig. On Zubaydah’s back they built an entire edifice of torture – “enhanced interrogation techniques” as the bloodless euphemism went – that in turn was founded upon a mountain of lies. When the worst of the torture was completed, to spare themselves from possible prosecution the CIA insisted that Zubaydah remain “in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life”.
Hardly anyone has tried to answer that question, but I believe the answer is simple: They weren’t hearing from the detainees how Saddam Hussein had implemented the 9/11 attack. They were obsessed with that idea and many people, particularly Dick Cheney simply didn’t believe that Osama Bin Laden and his organization were capable of such an attack.
We now know that most of the information provided by then Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN came from a man who had been paid bribes (Codename: Curveball because his handlers didn’t believe him). He told us that Saddam had implemented mobile labs for WMD creation which was an idea that US inspectors had cooked up to explain why they weren’t able to find stockpiles or manufacturing facilities for those weapons. In reality, we finally learned from the Dulfer report after the war that Saddam had destroyed and buried all of his WMDs after the first US War in 1991. He did this to give himself a way to get out from under UN sanctions, but he was afraid to admit he’d done this because those weapons were the only way that he was able to push back the Iranians during the Iraq/Iran war. So he kept it to himself.
Other false information claiming the Muhammed Atta had been trained on the use of WMD’s by Saddam was provided by a detainee named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi who Egypt had tortured.
What was the basis for Powell’s source of this nexus between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime? Ultimately, its roots lay in the invasion of Afghanistan two years earlier, and the rendition, detention and interrogation (RDI) programme that was used by the US to garner intelligence from those in their custody. Their main evidence was a confession extracted from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in Egypt, after he had been severely tortured and water-boarded into asserting that al-Qaeda had a link to Saddam in order to facilitate a chemical/biological attack against the West.
The testimony of al-Libi has since been widely discredited after it became clear that it was extracted under duress.
"They were killing me," al-Libi later said.
The United States Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) later confirmed that the information the CIA had used was completely incorrect.
A 2006 US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report establishes that the Egyptians “explained to him that a ‘long list of methods could be used against him which were extreme’ and that ‘he would confess because 3,000 individuals had been in the chair before him and that each had confessed.’”
He was asked about al-Qaeda’s connections to Iraq, and when the interrogators didn’t like his answers they “placed him in a small box approximately 50 cm x 50 cm” for about 17 hours and then punched him for 15 minutes. He then says that he concocted a story about al-Qaeda’s connections with Iraq and their interest in nuclear weapons.
Eventually, similar torture techniques were authorized by Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Those techniques were used on KSM who was waterboarded over 140 times until he still spilling his guts with made up lies.
What KSM didn’t tell us even after he was tortured - was the fact that the courier who had been identified by CIA was a direct link the Osama Bin Laden. He told us “he doesn’t matter.”
From Emptywheel.
The debate is now manipulating the question at issue, suggesting that the fact Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi provided tidbits (or, according to several reports, unconvincing denials) that led to OBL equates to us needing torture to get that intelligence. Particularly given that CIA used the denials of KSM and al-Libi as indications they were hiding something, it’s unclear why a denial without coercion would have served differently.
But there are two points that seem key in assessing the torture question. First, both KSM and al-Libi had critical intelligence they withheld under torture. KSM knew of Abu Ahmed’s trusted role and real name; al-Libi knew Abu Ahmed was OBL’s trusted courier and may have known of what became OBL’s compound.
And neither of them revealed that information to the CIA.
They waterboarded KSM 183 times in a month, and he either never got asked about couriers guarding OBL, or he avoided answering the question honestly. Had KSM revealed that detail, Bush might have gotten OBL 8 years ago.
Bush’s torture program made Zubaydah and KSM lie to us, and allowed Bin Laden to remain free for almost an additional decade.
The techniques authorized were Bush are exactly that tactics that were later used a Abu Ghraib which led to the death of the detainee known as the “Iceman.”
Military Police at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison dubbed him the Iceman; others used the nickname Mr. Frosty. Some even called him Bernie, after the character in the 1989 movie Weekend at Bernie’s, about a dead man whose associates carry him around as if he were still alive. The prisoner is listed as Manadel al-Jamadi in three official investigations of his death while in U.S. custody, a death that was ruled a homicide in a Defense Department autopsy. Photographs of his battered corpse — iced to keep it from decomposing in order to hide the true circumstances of his dying — were among the many made public in the spring of 2004, raising stark questions about America’s treatment of enemy detainees. For most of the horrors shown in those Abu Ghraib photographs, there has been some accounting. Although no officers were court-martialed, a soldier who held a prisoner on a leash got three years in prison; another who repeatedly hit detainees got 10 years. But those prisoners were held by members of the military, which has a relatively transparent system of punishing errant behavior. Al-Jamadi was a prisoner of the far more secretive CIA. That fact, for the moment, leaves unanswered the questions, If he was the victim of a homicide, who killed him? And will there be a trial?
Lies were the hallmark of the Bush Administration. Lies and political dirty tricks like the outing of CIA Agent Valerie Plame in order to cover up the “16 Words (of lies)” from Bush State of the Union. I won’t go on to detail that case, but you get the idea.
I don’t address all these subjects in this song — although I do mention Bush’s execution of Karla Faye Tucker while he was governor of Texas. Reportedly Tucker had become born-again while in prison and had begged for life to be spared, and Bush responded by mocking her and pathetically sniveling “Please, don't kill me.”
While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. 'Did you meet with any of them?' I ask.
Bush whips around and stares at me. 'No, I didn't meet with any of them,' he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. 'I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' 'What was her answer?' I wonder.
'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'
I must look shocked -- ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush -- because he immediately stops smirking.
'It's tough stuff,' Bush says, suddenly somber, 'but my job is to enforce the law.'
Yeah, ok dude. This was the kind of monster we had as President for 8 years.
And Trump is far, far worse.
Original Song - Say You Will