This week Random Lenghts News published a story I wrote on the emerging evidence about the role of torture in producing phony evidence for the Iraq War, and reality of how deeply entwined we are in the modern practice of torture. I've covered some of this on Open Left before, but I felt this telling of the story was well worth sharing.
Torturing Truth To Get To War?
"I want my colleagues and the American public to know that, measured against the information I have been able to gain access to, the story line we have been led to believe--the story line about waterboarding we have been sold--is false in every one of its dimensions." -- Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), speech to the US Senate, June 9. 2009.
For more than a month now, former Vice President Dick Cheney has been on a media blitz pushing the cause of torture under a more sanitized name. At the same time, more and more holes have been poked in his rosy view of the effectiveness of physical and psychological coercion. There's even evidence that getting bad intelligence to justify invading Iraq may have been part of the point, almost from the very beginning.
On April 22, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) released a report, "Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody," which concluded that harsh treatment "increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies." It also included testimony that torture was used in an attempt to establish a non-existent operational link between Iraq and al Qaeda. On May 13, Ali Soufan, formerly a top FBI interrogator, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture and borderline torture) "are ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda."
That same day, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, wrote in the Washington Note, "What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida."
Torture is neither new nor peripheral to American foreign policy, historian Alfred McCoy reminds us.
In 1972, fledgling historian Alfred McCoy published one of the most shocking exposés of an exposé-filled decade, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, which documented decades of cooperative relationships between the CIA and drug dealers, beginning with deals that allowed the almost-dead heroin trade to revive after WWII, and culminating in the role of the CIA in the drug trade surrounding the Vietnam War, which lead to the addiction of tens of thousands of US troops. The CIA tried-and failed-to have the book suppressed. A revised, updated and expanded version, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade was published in 2003.
One thing, at least, could be said in the CIA's defense: McCoy never claimed that the CIA set out to promote the global drug trade. It was simply a byproduct of how it chose to "fight Communism." But this could not be said about his subsequent investigation into the CIA's role in developing torture techniques, the subject of his 2006 book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror . The CIA's development of novel torture techniques was intentional, deliberate, and took place over more than a decade at enormous cost, after which its methods were shared with authoritarian allies around the world.
McCoy previewed his findings in a 2004 article for TomDispatch, "The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib", an excerpt of which I'll present on the flip. It's safe to say that no critic has thought harder and studied more intently the hidden role and hidden costs of torture in modern American history.
Last Sunday, TomDispatch published a new article by McCoy, "Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze: America's Political Paralysis Over Torture" that throws a chilling historical light on Obama's ongoing efforts to magically make torture disappear. Real change, of course, would mean putting an end to this nearly 60-year history of US involvement in modern torture. Instead, McCoy explains how Obama is simply preparing us for more of the same sordid history.
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