Tortured War

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was an Al Qaeda member captured in Pakistan in late 2001. The FBI questioned him, using their time-honored good cop techniques, and evidently got useful information out of him. But Bush and his puppet-master Dick Cheney wanted more. They wanted proof that Saddam Hussin and Al Qaeda were working together. They wanted WMDs.

So their little whore-lawyers wrote some memos, the “gloves came off,” and al-Libi was tortured by the CIA and its mercenary goons. Then he was delivered to the tender mercies of Egyptian state terror. Unsurprisingly, al-Libi told them what they wanted to hear. That it was false was irrelevant. They were, after all, fixing the evidence for their already-agreed upon plan to attack Iraq. Good soldier Colin Powell, who was just following orders, took al-Libi’s false confession to the U.N. as the centerpiece of his argument for attacking Iraq.

Dick Cheney is right. Torture, or whatever prettified name he prefers, does work. It got him his smoking gun.

As Jonathan Schell reminds us, the American torture program evolved out of a Cold War counter-torture strategy. In Korea, the Chinese came up with techniques to make American POWs make false confessions of war crimes for propaganda purposes. They used sensory deprivation and other methods to produce mental breakdowns. The US military later tried to train soldiers to resist these methods with the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program. Bush and Cheney flipped SERE on its head, and returned the methods back to their original use: the making of propaganda, not the gaining of information about mythological ticking time bombs, not the oft-spoken protection of the "homeland."