Logically Tortured

So U.S. President Barack Obama has released torture memos that prove the previous Bush Administration used the Justice Department to provide cover for their torture program. This, of course, is not news. Concerned insiders leaked this revelation years ago. The news is President Obama's insistence that those low level employees who did the torturing won't be prosecuted for "just following orders". (One wonders if he'll pardon those unfortunate saps who took the fall for the torture scandal at Abu Ghrahib Prison in Baghdad.) So much for the principles established at the Nuremberg trials in Germany after WW 2. I guess it's not an international war crime when certain Americans do it.

Obama deserves some credit for rightly leaving it up to Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate and bring charges against those in power who crafted the torture program, although I'm not holding my breath that Holder will feel brave enough to actually do it.

Listen to what constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said to MSNBC's David Shuster on Tues, April 21st "In the last week or so, we've seen an effort to define a potential investigation in terms of the lawyers who wrote these memos. ... A war crime investigation does not look at the people who drove the trains -- they look at the people who told the trains to roll."

"George Bush and Vice President Cheney, the CIA director, the attorney general ... implemented, in full knowledge that it was a war crime, the torture program," Turley emphasized. "The effort to define it in terms of lawyers is something of a Beltway shift. That is, it's setting us up for failure."

According to Turley, Attorney General Eric Holder "needs to appoint a special prosecutor and not limit it as to who committed the alleged war crimes."

To emphasize this point I commend to you an article by Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers, who writes that recently released documents indicate that "the small group of Justice Department lawyers who wrote memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques were operating not on their own but with direction from top administration officials, including then-Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. "

Now you know why Cheney is so cranky - I sincerely hope his heart holds out. Cough.

It was also very refreshing to hear Turley also correctly blast the idea of a "9-11 style commission" being set up to investigate the torture program.

"God help us if the only thing we get out of this is a commission modeled on 9/11," Turley commented. "That was a commission that was really made for Washington -- a commission composed of political appointees of both parties that ran interference for those parties -- a commission that insisted at the beginning it would not impose blame on individuals. So it's the ideal Washington commission -- a commission that would investigate without any repercussions."

Well, Mr. Turley, get ready to ask God for assistance. As the recent uproar from ex-VP Dick Cheney and his media minions proves, the Corporate Establishment is desperate to keep the "Jack Bauer, Torture Works Myth" alive. They do not want a fully informed public deducing exactly WHY they needed this torture program; namely, that false confessions were elicited to legitimize the lies of 9-11 and give the Bush neo-cons the green light to fulfill their PNAC dream. It seems apparent that those who are responsible for committing, aiding and abetting these war crimes infest the political and media elite - and will work day and night to keep covering up the truth.

The sick belief that torture works when used on "Islamic Radicals" is an epidemic. Even the so-called "Liberal Media" work hard at it. For instance, all this week on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report", they keep hammering away at the guilt of so-called "9-11 masterminds" Abu Zabayda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Jon Stewart actually complained about the "moral conundrum" that him and his staff were in, because torture is both morally repugnant and "effective".

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has been very good in covering the torture issue. However, he also seems not to understand that the official story about 9-11 falls apart if all the evidence has been gleaned through these "enhanced interrogation techniques".

From what I can make out, Olbermann seems to be advancing this theory : the reason why the Bushies needed to torture false confessions out of detainees was to establish a link between 9-11 and Saddam Hussein. Ostensibly, I suppose, to give them more P.R. ammunition in their push for the invasion of Iraq.

Sadly, Mr. Olbermann has yet to point out that if it wasn't for 9-11 - PNAC's longed for "new Pearl Harbour"; the invasion of Afghanistan would never have been condoned by the American people. Maybe Keith Olbermann is so sure of the official story because he's seen Colin Powell's famous "white paper". I'm sure you remember that Powell, Bush's first enabling Secretary of State (who later waved fake Anthrax around to insinuate that Iraq was behind that obvious inside job), had promised to hand over to the U.N. and the International Criminal Court documentation proving that Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" were behind 9-11. He never did.

Oh well, sacred cows are best left to superstition.

Just as an aside, it is interesting to note that the FBI has no hard evidence that bin Laden was behind 9-11. More astonishingly, a Dutch legal TV show called "The Devil's Advocate" has even exonerated the former "Johnny-Come-Lately" Mujahadeen. I find it hilarious that this has made former New York Mayor (and 9-11 co-conspirator after the fact) Rudy Guiliani upset. Go get booed at Yankee Stadium again, you putz. Lie through your teeth on camera once more. Try and cash in on some more tragedy while the 9-11 first responders wither and die because you allowed them to breathe in the toxic air around ground zero. Why don't you sell off some more evidence before any forensics can be done, that's what a great prosecutor does, isn't it?

I digress.

One can understand why it's so important to the Corporate elite that the tortured confessions from Zubayda and KSM be propped up as gospel truth. Thus, you will notice that whenever these two Emmanuel Goldstein's are mentioned in the Media, a menacing picture of them is always shown super-imposed behind the newsperson - with the designation "terrorist" printed across or below the face, glaring out at the public to give them their moment of hate and fear...to psychologically deaden the viewer to the humanity of this "savage".

Yet, if one simply reads this article: Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots, by Washington Post staff writers Peter Finn and Joby Warrick ; you will find this about Zubayda...

President George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Don't you hate it when facts wreck a good racist, war-mongering myth?

Wait! What about the scary, evil-looking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession that he was the mastermind behind 9-11?

Well, as Ben Macintyre of the London Times-online writes in his excellent article, "24 is fiction. So is the idea that torture works"

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times in one month, and “confessed” to murdering the journalist Daniel Pearl, which he did not. There could hardly be more compelling evidence that such techniques are neither swift, nor efficient, nor reliable.

So if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession about Pearl's murder was false, why should we believe his confession about 9/11?

Unfortunately, there is a logic behind the use of torture. It is a disturbing kind of logic - one can call it Machiavellian, Orwellian or Kafkaesque. Simply put, it is logical for the Powers That Be to use torture when they NEED false confessions. History has proven that it is the one sure result you will get from the deplorable practice.

When you need a scapegoat, that scapegoat is logically tortured.

Live long and prosper.