'We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories
Terri
Rich easily points out the many incongruencies of the reality of the
Bush administration and the verbal proclamations.
How do you think these blantant inconsistencies play out in the public?
How does it affect ordinary citizens to be repeatedly lied to? Does it
erode trust in Bush and his administration --- or all of government?
I suppose if more citizens get their news from a television news
source, they might, conceivable conclude: the US has a policy against
torture. However, the more literate in the population would recognize
the discrepancies in message and policy. The same thing happened at the
start of the war (and throughout this administration) when Bush was
proclaiming "support the troops" at the same time as congress was
reducing / eliminating benefits for veterans.
How do you think that the American people "make sense" of this sort of
thing? What does it do to a person upon realizing that a person's words
and action are not aligned.
To me, the basic elements of trust are eroding --- isn't trust based
on, in part, a person's words and actions being aligned? Who does he
think he's fooling? Are some American's buying it?
I will look forward to your thoughts.
-Terri
'We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 13 November 2005
If it weren't tragic it would be a New Yorker cartoon. The
president of the United States, in the final stop of his forlorn Latin
America tour last week, told the world, "We do not torture." Even as he
spoke, the administration's flagrant embrace of torture was as hard to
escape as publicity for Anderson Cooper.
The vice president, not satisfied that the C.I.A. had already been
implicated in four detainee deaths, was busy lobbying Congress to give
the agency a green light to commit torture in the future. Dana Priest
of The Washington Post, having first uncovered secret C.I.A. prisons
two years ago, was uncovering new "black sites" in Eastern Europe,
where ghost detainees are subjected to unknown interrogation methods
redolent of the region's Stalinist past. Before heading south, Mr. Bush
had been doing his own bit for torture by threatening to cast the first
veto of his presidency if Congress didn't scrap a spending bill
amendment, written by John McCain and passed 90 to 9 by the Senate,
banning the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners.
So when you watch the president stand there with a straight face
and say, "We do not torture" - a full year and a half after the first
photos from Abu Ghraib - you have to wonder how we arrived at this
ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated. When people in power
get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they
can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his
cronies did. Not anymore.
The fallout from the Scooter Libby indictment reveals that the
administration's credibility, having passed the tipping point with
Katrina, is flat-lining. For two weeks, the White House's talking-point
monkeys in the press and Congress had been dismissing Patrick
Fitzgerald's leak investigation as much ado about nothing except
politics and as an exoneration of everyone except Mr. Libby. Now the
American people have rendered their verdict: they're not buying it.
Last week two major polls came up with the identical finding, that
roughly 8 in 10 Americans regard the leak case as a serious matter. One
of the polls (The Wall Street Journal/NBC News) also found that 57
percent of Americans believe that Mr. Bush deliberately misled the
country into war in Iraq and that only 33 percent now find him "honest
and straightforward," down from 50 percent in January.
The Bush loyalists' push to discredit the Libby indictment failed
because Americans don't see it as a stand-alone scandal but as the
petri dish for a wider culture of lying that becomes more visible every
day. The last-ditch argument rolled out by Mr. Bush on Veterans Day in
his latest stay-the-course speech - that Democrats, too, endorsed
dead-wrong W.M.D. intelligence - is more of the same. Sure, many
Democrats (and others) did believe that Saddam had an arsenal before
the war, but only the White House hyped selective evidence for nuclear
weapons, the most ominous of all of Iraq's supposed W.M.D.'s, to whip
up public fears of an imminent doomsday.
There was also an entire other set of lies in the administration's
prewar propaganda blitzkrieg that had nothing to do with W.M.D.'s,
African uranium or the Wilsons. To get the country to redirect its
finite resources to wage war against Saddam Hussein rather than keep
its focus on the war against radical Islamic terrorists, the White
House had to cook up not only the fiction that Iraq was about to attack
us, but also the fiction that Iraq had already attacked us, on 9/11.
Thanks to the Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, who last weekend released a
previously classified intelligence document, we now have conclusive
evidence that the administration's disinformation campaign implying a
link connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda and 9/11 was even more duplicitous
and manipulative than its relentless flogging of nuclear Armageddon.
Senator Levin's smoking gun is a widely circulated Defense
Intelligence Agency document from February 2002 that was probably seen
by the National Security Council. It warned that a captured Qaeda
terrorist in American custody was in all likelihood "intentionally
misleading" interrogators when he claimed that Iraq had trained Qaeda
members to use illicit weapons. The report also made the point that an
Iraq-Qaeda collaboration was absurd on its face: "Saddam's regime is
intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements." But
just like any other evidence that disputed the administration's
fictional story lines, this intelligence was promptly disregarded.
So much so that eight months later - in October 2002, as the White
House was officially rolling out its new war and Congress was on the
eve of authorizing it - Mr. Bush gave a major address in Cincinnati
intermingling the usual mushroom clouds with information from that
discredited, "intentionally misleading" Qaeda informant. "We've learned
that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and
deadly gases," he said. It was the most important, if hardly the only,
example of repeated semantic sleights of hand that the administration
used to conflate 9/11 with Iraq. Dick Cheney was fond of brandishing a
nonexistent April 2001 "meeting" between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi
intelligence officer in Prague long after Czech and American
intelligence analysts had dismissed it.
The power of these lies was considerable. In a CBS News/New York
Times poll released on Sept. 25, 2001, 60 percent of Americans thought
Osama bin Laden had been the culprit in the attacks of two weeks
earlier, either alone or in league with unnamed "others" or with the
Taliban; only 6 percent thought bin Laden had collaborated with Saddam;
and only 2 percent thought Saddam had been the sole instigator. By the
time we invaded Iraq in 2003, however, CBS News found that 53 percent
believed Saddam had been "personally involved" in 9/11; other polls
showed that a similar percentage of Americans had even convinced
themselves that the hijackers were Iraqis.
There is still much more to learn about our government's duplicity
in the run-up to the war, just as there is much more to learn about
what has gone on since, whether with torture or billions of Iraq
reconstruction dollars. That is why the White House and its allies,
having failed to discredit the Fitzgerald investigation, are now so
desperate to slow or block every other inquiry. Exhibit A is the Senate
Intelligence Committee, whose Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, is
proving a major farceur with his efforts to sidestep any serious
investigation of White House prewar subterfuge. Last Sunday, the same
day that newspapers reported Carl Levin's revelation about the
"intentionally misleading" Qaeda informant, Senator Roberts could be
found on "Face the Nation" saying he had found no evidence of
"political manipulation or pressure" in the use of prewar intelligence.
His brazenness is not anomalous. After more than two years of
looking into the forged documents used by the White House to help
support its bogus claims of Saddam's Niger uranium, the F.B.I. ended
its investigation without resolving the identity of the forgers. Last
week, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported that an investigation into
the November 2003 death of an Abu Ghraib detainee, labeled a homicide
by the U.S. government, has been, in the words of a lawyer familiar
with the case, "lying kind of fallow." The Wall Street Journal
similarly reported that 17 months after Condoleezza Rice promised a
full investigation into Ahmad Chalabi's alleged leaking of American
intelligence to Iran, F.B.I. investigators had yet to interview Mr.
Chalabi - who was being welcomed in Washington last week as an honored
guest by none other than Ms. Rice.
The Times, meanwhile, discovered that Mr. Libby had set up a legal
defense fund to be underwritten by donors who don't have to be publicly
disclosed but who may well have a vested interest in the direction of
his defense. It's all too eerily reminiscent of the secret fund set up
by Richard Nixon's personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, to pay the legal
fees of Watergate defendants.
There's so much to stonewall at the White House that last week
Scott McClellan was reduced to beating up on the octogenarian Helen
Thomas. "You don't want the American people to hear what the facts are,
Helen," he said, "and I'm going to tell them the facts." Coming from
the press secretary who vowed that neither Mr. Libby nor Karl Rove had
any involvement in the C.I.A. leak, this scene was almost as funny as
his boss's "We do not torture" charade.
Not that it matters now. The facts the American people are
listening to at this point come not from an administration that they no
longer find credible, but from the far more reality-based theater of
war. The Qaeda suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman on 11/9, like
the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London before them, speak louder
than anything else of the price we are paying for the lies that
diverted us from the war against the suicide bombers of 9/11 to the war
in Iraq.
-------
T.McClure
I've done some research on the topic long before it broke national
news. The thing is, they aren't talking about everything thats going on
concerning torture. The US also practices "Extraordinary Rendition,"
which is the practice of kidnapping terror suspects, either in the US
or ina foreign country, taking them to an allied country such as Egypt,
Syria, Morocco, etc. Once we hand them over to that country, they are
put in well-known torture prisons and routinely beaten, hung from the
walls, whipped with thick electric cables, nails ripped off, boiled to
death, etc.
Except when the ban was proposed in Congress, instead of getting the
almost unanimous vote that the torture bill recieved under pressure
from the public, it was quickly killed, and we still do it today.
Terri
Tim, would you please consider sharing your research with us on this
discussion board? What is your field of research?
I am very aware of "rendition" and read about the case with the
Syrian-born Canadian (Mahr Arar) in which this innocent Canadian was
sent to Syria and abused. This is a perfect example about what you are
referring to ("Extraordinary Rendition")
http://www.cbc.ca/ottawa/story/ot-arar20050518.html
It is just incredible to me the degree to which the US controls the
whole world and can do whatever illegal and abuses tactics it chooses
without any consequences. The mighty US far surpasses any other country
with regard to military and economic might --- that no other country or
any intenational entity can regulate or put restrictions on US policy.
As this is a "political psychology'" discussion group --- I am
interested in what sort of personal impact this kind of information has
on ordinary citizens.
That is, even if one's own life is running relatively smooth and
reasonably uneventful.....how does one react/respond to the depth of US
abuses abroad and at home. I am interested in how political and
governmental aspects effect each of us.
Although we are not being abused/mistreated.....does it impact others
to know that your govenment is.
Personally, I find it very disconcerting to be a citizen of a govenment
that has such inhumane practices.
Any thoughts on this?
Terri
T.McClure
say "research" i don't mean anything major, but since I am in debate
and am exceptionally politically active for my age range, I have spent
many hours researching the subject.
Basically my research includes scouring the internet and books for news
articles, etc, that speak of this rendition and compile an
anti-rendering case for which to ban it (for debate). Because of the
overwhelming moral highground and the pressure on the judge for him to
vote for our plan since noone can deny that rendition is a horrible
act, we win with it often.
However, this does not mean that the issue is a mere research topic and
nothing more to me! I am very against this practice of the federal
government and am horrified at the idea that a nation which should be a
beacon of the light of freedom in a world of tyranny.
It is this that frightens me most. Yes, the American citizen's trust in
our government is eroding, but that is not the major issue. The major
issue is the damage this practice has on the United States's influence
in foreign affairs. No longer can we pressure other countries on human
rights issues or even to do things diplomatically at all. All our
credibility will be lost!
On the case of which you are talking about, I have seen that specific
one several times. Others include a man being kidnapped at NYC's JFK
airport security, and immediately taken to a foreign middle-eastern
country. Others still include the US sending gulfstream jets to other
foreign countries to simply kidnap them.
It's a horrible situation which is actually detrimental to the War on
Terror, often giving us false information. Many of the torturees (if
you will) have admitted to telling the authorities whatever they wanted
them to say just to escape the prisons alive. When Senator John McCain
was being tortured in Vietnam, they asked him to give the names of some
important officers. Instead he gave them the names of the starting
offensive line for the Green Bay Packers.
It's clear that torture in this fashion does not work, but in fact
works against us in the war.