Pelosi and Waterboarding: Why All The Fuss Over Old News?

Published on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 by Mother Jones

by Josh Harkinson

Strangely absent from the recent coverage of Pelosi's past knowledge of U.S. torture policies is any acknowledgement that this story is old news. Really old news. Way back in December, 2007, the Washington Post ran a piece headlined, "Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002." It hit Pelosi with the exact same allegations that have been so breathlessly reported as of late:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

So what's new? For one, Republicans are under intense moral and political threat and see a chance divert responsibility for their misdeeds back to Democrats.

To be sure, Pelosi should have taken action against U.S. torture policies as soon as she was briefed on them. And she's now paying the price for being too politically cowardly-or opportunistic-to address this issue head-on when the Post broke the story back in 2007. But it's disingenuous for the press and Pelosi's political rivals to feign outrage over what Pelosi knew and when. What did they know and when? Assuming they read the news, why didn't they make an issue of this back in 2007?

One politician did make an issue of the Post story at the time. Cindy Sheehan, the Peace Mom, ran a quixotic campaign against Pelosi for her House seat last year, and garnered 16 percent of the vote and very little press. Key to her electoral strategy was capitalizing on liberal outrage-surprisingly tepid outrage, it turned out-over what Pelosi knew. She even called for Pelosi to be stripped of her leadership post over the news. "I was appalled and really saddened," Sheehan told me at the time. "We can't be represented by a person like this."

Seventy two percent of San Francisco voters thought otherwise.

With Sheehan's failed challenge in mind, it's hard to put credence in today's New York Times story on Pelosi's political fate, which quotes Bay Area resident Delphine Langille of San Ramon: "I'm very skeptical of what she's saying, Langille told the Times on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, "and when she goes to get re-elected, this could really damage her credibility." Yeah right. There's simply no way a Republican could ever mount a viable challenge in San Francisco, no way the Democratic establishment would ever try, and no way--as we've seen--that a third party outsider will take her down.

Politics is morally mushy business. The political climate was clearly more pro-torture back in 2002 than it is now. A braver politician might have spoken out sooner, but also might not have risen to the Speaker post. The interesting thing about San Franciscans is that they are politically sophisticated enough to entertain a race like Sheehan's while also voting for a pragmatist like Pelosi. And they can certainly distinguish between the moral clarity-or absolutism-of someone like Sheehan, and the immoral opportunism of liberal-come-lately Republicans. Let's hope the press and the rest of the nation eventually figure this out too.

© 2009 Mother Jones

As Mother Jones' West Coast reporter, Josh keeps a close eye on natural resource issues, digital democracy, and the environment. Before joining Mother Jones as an investigative fellow in 2006, Josh spent three years as a staff writer at the Houston Press.

Obama's Great Afghanistan Gamble

Published on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 by Mother Jones

Everyone knows 17,000 more troops can't win the war in Afghanistan. So what's the exit strategy?

by Robert Dreyfuss

IF YOU CAN'T IMAGINE how President Obama intends to win the war in Afghanistan, you're not alone. The challenge is daunting: Along with a handful of war-plagued African states-Somalia, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo-Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries. It's been racked by 30 years of war. Millions have fled into Pakistan and Iran; tens of thousands more have been killed since the US-backed jihad in the 1980s. "The reason we don't have moderate leaders in Afghanistan today is because we let the nuts kill them all," Cheryl Benard, Rand Corporation specialist and wife of former US Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, told me in 2004, during an interview for a book on political Islam. Obama's advisers say that their plan is to surge, then negotiate-that is, beef up the US presence, stabilize the war, and then seek a deal backed by regional diplomacy. But that raises a host of questions, starting with: If negotiations are the answer, who's at the table?

President Hamid Karzai: His government is, well, mostly nonexistent. "Forty percent of the country is either partly or entirely off-limits to the government and to international aid groups," says Mark Schneider of the International Crisis Group. Karzai has been derided as merely the "mayor of Kabul," but it's worse than that: "He doesn't have much influence with parliament, so you can't even say that he controls the capital," says Marvin Weinbaum, a former State Department intelligence official who advised Obama's campaign. Terrorists strike fortified targets in Kabul, from the Indian Embassy to the Ministry of Justice, with impunity.

Karzai is struggling to regain control. By skillfully appointing governors and mayors, he's built a cadre of officials loyal to the regime. Still, in the provinces, the government's writ is weak. Law enforcement and the courts are virtually absent, leaving the field to criminals and drug traffickers. Corruption poisons everything: Afghanistan is ranked 176 out of 180 countries surveyed by the corruption watchdog group Transparency International; it produces more than nine-tenths of the world's illicit opium; and criminal gangs reach from the most remote districts into Karzai's own family-one of his brothers has been accused of involvement in the heroin trade.

The security forces: The pre-surge force of 13,100 US and 56,420 NATO troops (including 24,900 Americans) has been unable to secure Kabul and its environs, not to mention huge swaths of the south. Some NATO forces do little fighting, and some, like Canada's, are leaving. Afghan public opinion is turning against the coalition, partly because of rising civilian casualties caused by air strikes. Meanwhile the 80,000-strong Afghan National Army can't operate on its own, while the Afghan National Police, also numbering around 80,000, are dysfunctional, corrupt, and infiltrated by Taliban fighters; many are merely militiamen for local warlords.

The Taliban: In the 1990s, they rode to power by mobilizing armies of orphans and refugees brainwashed in Pakistani madrassas; toppled in 2001, they've come roaring back in rural areas where Karzai's feckless governors and crooked cops are viewed with disdain. They use threats, blandishments, and their cultlike ideology to expand their power base, village by village and clan by clan. Yet their hold is not as firm as it might seem. Polls indicate that 9 out of 10 Afghans disapprove of the Taliban. And, notes Seth Jones, an Afghanistan expert at Rand, "Most of the tribal, subtribe, and clan leaders don't particularly care for the central government, and they don't particularly care for the Taliban. They are willing to switch sides." The hardcore Taliban, he estimates, may be as small as just 2,000 to 3,000 fighters. They do, however, have allies-other militant factions, criminal gangs, and, of course, their own brethren beyond Afghanistan's borders. In Pakistan, the Taliban shura (council) is run by Mullah Mohammad Omar, the one-eyed true believer who headed Afghanistan until 2001. Farther north, Mullah Omar's allies include the Haqqanis, heirs to one of the more violent jihadist factions from the US-sponsored war in the 1980s, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, perhaps that war's most bloodthirsty combatant, both of whom regularly dispatch fighters into contested areas surrounding Kabul. (See Your Tax Dollars at War.)

The new players: With US advice and funding, Karzai is trying to counter the Taliban through a pair of new initiatives. The Afghan Social Outreach Program is quietly building anti-Taliban local councils. A parallel program, the Afghan Public Protection Force, has a pilot project under way in Wardak province to build quasi-official militias not unlike the US-sponsored Sunni Awakening that mobilized Iraqi tribes against Al Qaeda. J Alexander Thier of the US Institute of Peace is hopeful. But, he says, "It scares the bejesus out of people because this would result in the arming of Pashtun militias. It's extremely risky."

Which gets us back to the question: What's the endgame of the surge-and-negotiate strategy? Already there is plenty of negotiating behind the scenes. Karzai has an ongoing dialogue with the Taliban, with former Taliban allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan mediating, and there are reports of talks involving Hekmatyar, too. But Obama's advisers are split on whether those top-down negotiations will work: Some suspect that there can be no deal as long as the Taliban think they're winning.

An alternative approach gaining favor inside the beltway is bottom-up negotiations to mirror the Taliban's village-by-village strategy. "This is a country that historically has had very little central government," General David McKiernan, the US commander, said last November. "But it's a government with a history of local autonomy and local tribal authority systems." Jones, of Rand, says the key is winning the loyalty of rural Afghans. If it's done right-if America maintains a light footprint, if tribal leaders see improvements in security (as well as cold, hard cash), and if Afghanistan's meddling neighbors can be persuaded to help stabilize the country-then the loyalties of the Pashtun tribes may turn. If that happens, Jones says hopefully, "They can tip pretty quickly." Of course, if the surge causes more civilian deaths and further inflames anger at the United States, they could just as easily tip the other way. Therein lies the great risk of Obama's gamble.

© 2009 Mother Jones

Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is an investigative journalist in Alexandria, Virginia, specializing in politics and national security. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam and is a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones.

The Disease of Permanent War

Published on Monday, May 18, 2009 by TruthDig.com

by Chris Hedges

The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.

It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls-the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads - personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.

"War," Randolf Bourne commented acidly, "is the health of the state."

In "Pentagon Capitalism" Seymour Mellman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures towards their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule and our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war.

Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $le1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.

Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war-who have corrupted Leon Trotsky's doctrine of permanent revolution-must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.

Mellman, who coined the term permanent war economy to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current, and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. It comes with guaranteed profits. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junk yards where they rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs. Mellman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation's infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars. Mellman estimated that such a contract could have generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in the United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Mellman found that ninety-two were imported and only eight were made in the United States.

The late Senator J. William Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book "The Pentagon Propaganda Machine." Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced and shaped public opinion through multimillion dollar public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority of the military analysts on television are former military officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of Defense Solutions, Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.

Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.

The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Notes from the Underground to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in Notes from the Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to its logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us.

"I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."

We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems, economic, social, environmental and political, that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade.

© 2009 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.

Spanish Investigation Reveals 'An Approved Systematic Plan of Torture' Under Bush

Published on Monday, May 18, 2009 by RebelReports

While Obama and the US Congress refuse to hold Bush-era torturers accountable, a Spanish judge fights for accountability and uncovers more US atrocities.

by Jeremy Scahill

On Friday, I wrote a piece for AlterNet on how the Obama administration is continuing to use a notorious military police unit at Guantanamo that regularly brutalizes unarmed prisoners, despite Obama's pledge to uphold the Geneva Convention. This force officially known as the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF) has been labelled the "Extreme Repression Force" by Gitmo prisoners. Its members were also characterized as the "Black Shirts of Guantanamo" by human rights lawyer Michael Ratner. The IRF force is "an extrajudicial terror squad that has regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner's head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them - sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end."

There has been very little public attention focused on this force. But, as I noted in my story, this unit could potentially be subjected to legal scrutiny, even if the Congress and Justice Department refuse to do their jobs. That's because one of the men brutalized by this force is a primary figure in the (largely ignored by the US media) Spanish investigation-a British resident named Omar Deghayes. (See my article, "Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama," for more on this story.)

Deghayes's torture, including under the IRF Teams at Guantanamo, was highlighted in Spanish Judge Balthazar Garzon's criminal investigation into the US torture program. A total of five Spanish citizens or residents were held by the US at Guantanamo. Testimony of four of those men is cited by the Spanish investigators. In addition to Deghayes, the men are: Hamed Abderraman Ahmed, Lahcen Ikassrien and Jamiel Abdulatif Al Banna. (An English translation of the Spanish writ was recently released by the Center for Constitutional Rights and can be accessed here.)

All of the victims cited in the Spanish investigation were moved to various locations where they were allegedly tortured before ultimately being transferred to Guantanamo where the torture continued and intensified. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, "all" occurred "under the authority of American military personnel"  and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

The Spanish writ does not name specific defendants or suspects in its investigation, but rather seeks to investigate the role of those who planned, coordinated and implemented the torture of its citizens and residents. "This systematic plan may point to the existence of a coordinated action for the commission of a multiplicity of torture crimes... a plan that would seem to approximate an official level and that, therefore, would give rise to criminal liability for the various schemes of committing, ordering, designing, and authorizing this systematic plan of torture." On April 29, Garzon gave the green light to the investigation citing Spain's Universal Jurisdiction law.

While Deghayes's case appears to include the most extreme case of torture among the five cited by the Spanish investigation, the others contain some pretty gut-wrenching stories. According to the Spanish investigation,

Hamed Abderraman Ahmed was captured in November 2001 in Pakistan and was handed over to the US military in Kandahar, Afghanistan two months later and was then taken to Guantanamo in January 2002. At Camp X-Ray, he was confined to a metal mesh "chicken wire" cell that exposed him to the extreme heat of the Caribbean sun and "left him little more than a half-meter by half-meter of space to move in." Additionally, the cells were lit with electric lights around the clock, which "produced vision and sleep disorders." For over a year, he says he and other prisoners were allowed to leave their cells for two 15-minute periods a week. Ahmed also says the US constantly blared "American patriotic songs." Ahmed was released to Spanish custody by the US in February 2004 and was acquitted by Spain's Supreme Court.

Lhacen Ikassrien, who is a Moroccan citizen and a 13 year resident of Spain was taken from Afghanistan to Guantanamo in February 2002. He claims US personnel "never explained to him why he had been deprived of freedom." At Guantanamo, Ikassrien claims he "Received blows to his testicles," according to the Spanish investigation. "He relates that they inoculated him through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts.'" Ikassrien and other former prisoners claim the US prison authorities "introduced into the cell very cold air and chemical substances that affected his breathing and joints." Ikassrien was handed over to Spain in July 2005 and was also acquitted.

A Palestinian citizen, Jamiel Abdelatif al Banna was taken by the US military in Gambia in November 2002 and was ultimately transferred to Guantanamo in January 2003 where he remained until December 2007. Before arriving at Guantanamo, al Banna says US personnel  took him to Afghanistan for a brief period where he was kept "underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep, and, forced him to witness torture carried out on other prisoners in Afghanistan," according to the Spanish investigation. He also "received strong blows to the head with a loss of consciousness."

Once he arrived at Guantanamo, al Banna was "under a regimen of total isolation for one year, permanently bound with shackles." During his time at Guantanamo, he was "subjected to some one thousand interrogations in sessions lasting from 2-10 hours per day." He was also "held by shackles on the hands and feet (wrists and ankles), in forced positions, seated on the floor with his body doubled forward and with pressure from the interrogators on his back to increase the pain until it made him scream and rendered him unable to stand upright on his feet for several hours afterwards." Al Banna was also "subjected to threats of death by poisoning or by drowning in the sea." Like Ikassrien, al Banna described chemicals placed in his environment that caused "coughing fits and respiratory problems." His mesh wired cell allegedly "produced asthenopia (eyestrain) in him and in other prisoners, to the point of rendering him incapable of reading." Al Banna also describes being attacked by the Immediate Reaction Force teams. "In one of these attacks, Al Banna suffered injuries to the ring finger of his right hand, left side of his forehead and the back part of his left knee," according to the investigation.

Judge Garzon says the treatment of these men, combined with recently declassified US documents show "an approved systematic plan of torture and ill-treatment on persons deprived of their freedom without any charge and without the basic rights of all detainees as set out and required by applicable international treaties."

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights has said it "is conceivable that arrest warrants have already been issued or will be soon. Indictments will almost surely follow. The torture team's travel options are narrowing."

© 2009 Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

Powell Aide Says Torture Helped Build Iraq War Case

Published on Friday, May 15, 2009 by CNN

by Matt Smith

Finding a "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the abusive interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, a former State Department official told CNN on Thursday.

Vice President Dick Cheney speaks during a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad March 17, 2008. (REUTERS/Ceerwan Aziz)

The allegation was included in an online broadside aimed at former Vice President Dick Cheney by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney's office kept close tabs on the questioning.

"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda," Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said his accusation is based on information from current and former officials. He said he has been "relentlessly digging" since 2004, when Powell asked him to look into the scandal surrounding the treatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

"I couldn't walk into a courtroom and prove this to anybody, but I'm pretty sure it's fairly accurate," he told CNN.

Most of Wilkerson's online essay criticizes Cheney's recent defense of the "alternative" interrogation techniques the Bush administration authorized for use against suspected terrorists. Cheney has argued the interrogation program was legal and effective in preventing further attacks on Americans.

Critics say the tactics amounted to the illegal torture of prisoners in U.S. custody and have called for investigations of those who authorized them.

Representatives of the former vice president declined comment on Wilkerson's allegations. But Wilkerson told CNN that by early 2002, U.S. officials had decided that "we had al Qaeda pretty much on the run."

"The priority had turned to other purposes, and one of those purposes was to find substantial contacts between al Qaeda and Baghdad," he said.

The argument that Iraq could have provided weapons of mass destruction to terrorists such as al Qaeda was a key element of the Bush administration's case for the March 2003 invasion. But after the invasion, Iraq was found to have dismantled its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, and the independent commission that investigated the 2001 attacks found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between the two entities.

Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.

At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.

"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."

Al-Libi's claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. It also was part of Powell's February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war, a speech Powell has called a "blot" on his record.

Al-Libi later recanted the claim, saying it was made under torture by Egyptian intelligence agents, a claim Egypt denies. He died last week in a Libyan prison, reportedly a suicide, Human Rights Watch reported.

Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for the U.S.-based group, called al-Libi's allegation "pivotal" to the Bush administration's case for war, as it connected Baghdad to the terrorist organization behind the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

And an Army psychiatrist assigned to support questioning of suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba told the service's inspector-general that interrogators there were trying to connect al Qaeda and Iraq.

"This is my opinion," Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general's office. "Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Burney's account was included in a Senate Armed Services Committee report released in April. Other interrogators reported pressure to produce intelligence "but did not recall pressure to identify links between Iraq and al Qaeda," the Senate report states.

Cheney criticized Powell during a television interview over the weekend, saying he no longer considers Powell a fellow Republican after his former colleague endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

Wilkerson said he is not speaking for his former boss and does not know whether Powell shares his views.

© 2009 Cable News Network

Obama Is Becoming an Accessory after the fact to War Crimes

Published on Friday, May 15, 2009 by The Progressive

by Matthew Rothschild

Barack Obama is fast becoming an accessory after the fact to the war crimes that the Bush Administration has committed.

By not prosecuting the torturers and those who ordered the torture, and now by not even going public with the photo tortures he'd already agreed to release, Obama is doing Dick Cheney's business for him.

Cheney's been telling every news outlet that will have him on that a) we didn't torture or do anything wrong and that b) everything we did was necessary to keep us safe.

The photos of our brutality that are in Obama's possession could disprove these points in a hurry.

But now Obama, like Cheney, wants to hide the evidence.

Obama says he's worried that releasing the photos might enflame hatred against Americans and imperil the troops.

But Obama can douse that flame by acknowledging that a previous Administration committed these crimes, that we find them abhorrent, that they will not occur under his watch, and that those who committed the crimes and ordered the crimes will be held responsible.

Instead, he's caving in to the Cheneys and the Limbaughs and the O'Reillys.

This is profoundly undemocratic.

Our system is based on openness. And if people acting in our name did something heinous, we have a right to know that, and we need to come to grips with that, in all its heinousness, so it won't happen again.

Beyond being undemocratic, hiding the evidence may itself be a criminal act.

The statute says: "Whoever, knowing that an offense has been committed, receives, relieves, comforts or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his apprehension, trial or punishment, is an accessory after the fact."

Obama is relieving, comforting and assisting all those who tortured and countenanced torture.

He is staining himself with the crimes of his predecessor. And that's a crime.

© 2009 The Progressive

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

Robbing Us and Paying Out

Published on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 by Grit TV

by Laura Flanders

The results of the Treasury Department’s touted "stress tests" are out – and so far the result is a call for massive new capital for banks. It adds up to a needed $100 billion for Wells Fargo, Bank of America and the rest. Sooner or later we’ll be looking at TARP Three, I bet.

It's hard not to feel bilked. Even when they were running short of cash, the banks looked after their own. According to a recent academic study they paid out a staggering $400 billion to investors in 2007 and 2008 even as the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression broke. With the value of their portfolios shrinking and common equity drying up, Lehman Brothers dividends went up 13% in January 2008. TARP recipients JPMorgan and Wells Fargo cut dividends only in February and March 2009, and as of late last month, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had yet to do so, despite urging from the Fed.

Watching their own backs is what these banks do best. Now they're doing it by lobbying to beat back bankruptcy reform.(See a pretty furious discussion on GRITtv this week.) At the banks, public money goes in the front and comes out the back.

Meanwhile, while the government's doing somersaults to keep owners and top bank managers in place and in the black, many Americans are choosing between food and home and gas.

It’s not only unfair, it's not smart.

There is no fair rationale for allocating trillions of US dollars to protect bankers' hedge funds and well-paid execs while tens of millions of working Americans go belly up.

Societies dominated by finance (as ours has been,) have always collapsed. The only way the US gets back on track is with good paying jobs in solid communities that work. In New York, Wall Street's cheering up – but libraries are going broke. Just imagine if you took the trillions and kept teachers on the job, built roads, gave people grants to re-do homes, issue fair mortgages, and provide quality childcare.

Let's not kid ourselves: filtering trillions through banks and investment houses won't do the job -- they built their billions by cutting labor and keeping down pay – and rewarding companies that did the same -- especially their execs. If we do not rebuild the US workforce there's no way this country's going back up. Are we "all in this together?" -- Hardly. You just have to look at Main Street to know that.

© 2009 Laura Flanders

Laura Flanders is the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on Free Speech TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415) on cable (8 pm ET on Channel 67 in Manhattan) and online daily at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com.