It's hard to know who most deserves the Up Is Down Award right now, especially when it comes to the Room 101 case currently unfolding to reveal that Bush and his apologists really were every bit as bad as his most vociferous detractors said.
I mean, which of these is more loathsome, morally corrupt and un-American?
According to McClatchy (a beacon of good reporting during the pre-war propaganda effort) today, the Bush administration wanted to torture in order to bolster their rationale for war despite the CIA telling them what they wanted to hear simply wasn't true. In other words, they intended to get false confessions that backed their march to war.
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist. …
A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration. …
"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.
"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."
Or how about this–more reprehensible?
The methods the Bush administration approved were modeled on practices that expressly obtained false confessions, methods used by fine folks like Pol Pot, the North Koreans and more.
From the New York Times:
Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.
They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.
Or finally, this:
John Yoo and Jay Bybee soberly quoted in the released memos statistics taken (to all appearances–so much is redacted it is hard to establish beyond all shadow of doubt) from the work of a psychologist, Dr. Jerald Ogrisseg, who had observed some of the interrogation methods in trainings settings through SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape school for the military). They relied in part on those numbers to say torture was legally permissible. Turns out that not only were they using absurd logic to justify these techniques–the effects of training with "captors" who one knows to be U.S. military personnel might be a little different than facing a real adversary, for one thing–they also weren't listening to all of what Dr. Ogrisseg said, like the bit that undercut the very premise of their argument:
Ogrisseg, quoted at Alternet:
The final area I recall Lt Col Baumgartner asking me about were my thoughts on using the waterboard against the enemy. I asked [sic] responded by asking, “wouldn’t that be illegal?” He replied that some people were asking from above about the utility of using this technique against the enemy for the same reasons I wouldn’t use it in training. I replied that I wouldn’t go down that path because, aside from being illegal, it was a completely different arena that we in the Survival School didn’t know anything about.
Which of these worthy efforts deserves the most scorn? And how long until the odious John Yoo gets to work on his own defense in front of a war crimes court?
