Below is an excerpt of Smith’s 2003 Harpers article, retelling the early stages of the Iraq war, composed entirely of public statements from the Bush administration — All of them, FALSE!

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We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we’d just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said we hadn’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.

We changed the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people. We didn’t want to occupy Iraq. War is a terrible thing. We’ve tried every other means to achieve objectives without a war because we understood what the price of a war can be and what it is. We sought peace. We strove for peace. Nobody, but nobody, was more reluctant to go to war than President Bush…

Read More–> A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies by: Sam Smith, Harpers, October 2003

Jed Lewison posted this at Daily Kos TV, Jan. 13.  The video displays Sarah Palin associating the 9/11 attacks with Iraq twice during the 2008 presidential campaign.

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Evidence of torture, new and old, has landed President Obama in a bit of a quandary.  A significant percentage of his supporters are calling for criminal prosecution of Bush officials responsible for apparent war crimes.  Meanwhile, the President’s detractors pose numerous counter arguments, recommending against investigating the Bush Administration’s torture policy.  Barack Obama is in a tight spot, and his impetus to “look forward, not back” is understandable considering the antagonistic state of political affairs in America.  However, as unpleasant as investigations and prosecutions will be domestically, external perspectives need to be considered.

Perhaps the most important foreign perspective worth considering is that of our enemy:  Al Qaeda.  How is the argument over torture within the U.S. perceived by Osama Bin Ladin ?  More importantly, how does it impact their recruiting capacity?  To a certain extent, we already know the answers.

One extremely informed opinion was published at The Daily Beast last week.  Writing under the pseudonym, Matthew Alexander, a 14 year Air Force interrogator offered his assessment in a April 20 post.  Responding to Christopher Buckley’s and Michael Mukasey’s criticisms of Obama for releasing the previously classified Office of Legal Council torture memos, Alexander wrote:

Our policy of torture and abuse of prisoners has been Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool, a point that Buckley does not mention and is also conspicuously absent from former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s argument in the Wall Street Journal. As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse…

In addition to increasing Al Qaeda’s pool of recruits, the torturing of detainees has undoubtedly led counter terrorism officials to waste time and resources chasing invented threats.  Former Middle East CIA field officer, Robert Baer noted in the May 4 print issue of Time that the Bush Administration selected their techniques from a 1957 paper regarding communist efforts during the Korean War:

The Crucial point, though, is that even the communists suspected that torture can’t be relied on to produce more than false confessions — because people will say anything to make the pain stop.  This is the history that Bush officials chose to ignore…

I’d love to know what you think.  If you’re able, set aside the moral and legal implications of the Bush Administration’s treatment of captured enemy combatants.  Then consider the implications of the above informed commentators, Alexander and Baer; respectively, that torturing our prisoners makes it easier for our enemies to recruit, and that waterboading, specifically, is more likely than not to produce false information from a prisoner.  These tactics, then, are quite contradictory to the maintenance of U.S. national security.

(Originally posted at Care2.com, Political Causes Blog 28 April 2009)

This was originally published @ Care2.com:

Former Vice President, Dick Cheney, was at it again last Sunday.  He adamantly vocalized his disapproval of President Obama’s national security policy, and was incredulous about the idea that Bush Administration officials should be investigated for their treatment of enemy combatants.  Of course, Cheney has every right to voice his opinion in these matters, though such criticism from a former VP is highly unusual.  However, considering the Bush Administration’s past behavior in politicizing traditionally non-political government entities, how are the claims of Dick Cheney, in any way, credible?

On last Sunday’s Face the Nation, one of Cheney’s statements deserved more scrutiny than the 30 min. program allowed:

One of the things that I did six weeks ago was I made a request that two memos that I personally know of, written by the CIA, that lay out the successes of those policies and point out in considerable detail all of — all that we were able to achieve by virtue of those policies, that those memos be released, be made public.

First of all, the “two memos… that lay out the successes of those policies,” couldn’t possibly discount that torturing detainees enhanced the ability of terrorists to recruit new supporters.  So, even if the memos in question reveal productive results, those results were, at best, a push when considering the policy’s impact on US national security.

Second, and more importantly, how can two memos vindicate policies that were in clear violation of prescriptions within the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture?  Jeremy Scahill summed up why the policies can’t be excused, particularly as they apply to the latter, “This is a matter of law and US obligations to its international treaties, which the Constitution explicitly states the US will respect and enforce.”  The memos, even if they support what Cheney suggests, are illustrative of a policy that was blatantly illegal.

Finally, consider the behavior of Dick Cheney and others in the run up to the Iraq invasion.  There is a pattern of deceptive practices by Bush officials in shaping policies and intelligence to fit their goals.  The Office of Special Plans (OSP) is an instructive example.  Jason Leopold, presently of ThePublicRecord.org, reported for Truthout.org in 2007:

The Office of Special Plans routinely provided President Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, who headed the National Security Council at the time, with questionable intelligence information on the Iraqi threat. Much of that information was included in various speeches by Bush and Cheney, and some was never vetted for accuracy by career CIA analysts…

…Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker in May 2003 that the Office of Special Plans “started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the president. It’s not intelligence. It’s political propaganda.”

The OSP was developed by Donald Rumsfeld out of frustration regarding the lack of actionable intelligence on Iraq’s capabilities and intentions.  Headed by Douglas Feith — whom Gen. Tommy Franks once referred to as the “Dumbest MF’er on the planet” — the OSP did not gather new intelligence.  Rather, the Department of Defense office reinterpreted existing data, cherry-picking and restating evidence to support the invasion of Iraq.  When Dick Cheney insists upon a link between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein, the OSP is the source of his evidence.  Of course, we now know there was no such link.

This is merely one example, but when considered along with Cheney’s insistence that waterboarding “worked” and “kept us safe,” how can he be taken seriously?  Let me know what you think.

Personally, I wouldn’t put it past Cheney to contort evidence to fit his narrative.  It is entirely plausible that, in calling for the release of the two CIA memos, the former Vice President is cherry-picking evidence just as he did before the invasion of Iraq.  Further, it is more than plausible, as was indicated today by FBI agent, Ali Soufan, in his testimony before Congress that the interrogation methods DO NOT WORK.  Soufan said the harsh techniques were “ineffective, slow and unreliable and as a result, harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaida.”:

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When the past actions of Dick Cheney are considered along with his present public statements, it is entirely possible that torture was employed, not to discover a link between Al Qaida and Iraq, but to create one.

Rachel is now the official voice for fighting against Bush historical revisionism

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