Through the Looking Glass on Torture

Today's New York Times explains that yet another piece of prewar intelligence on Iraq was bogus:

The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Mr. Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.

At Kos, Armando, writing about the story, had this to add: "It is mindboggling that, knowing this, the Bush Administration has fought tooth and nail against banning torture by the United States."

I'd say that's the exact reason they have fought against banning torture. They WANTED to extract false confessions. We know that the White House knew there was no Iraq-al Qaeda link within days, DAYS, of September 11. They start to capture some bad guys in Afghanistan, but they want their Iraq war. They start using interrogation techniques that were SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED to extract false confessions.

Read this for details. An excerpt:

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods.

SERE methods are classified, but the program's principles are known. It sought to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some detainees, and broke the spirits of many more, through Pavlovian and other conditioning. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, painful body positions and punitive control over life's most intimate functions produced overwhelming stress in these prisoners. Stress led in turn to despair, uncontrollable anxiety and a collapse of self-esteem. Sometimes hallucinations and delusions ensued. Prisoners who had been through this treatment became pliable and craved companionship, easing the way for captors to obtain the "confessions" they sought.

I think so many of us have wondered "Why in the hell are we torturing people" in a war supposedly structured to win hearts and minds. Well, since the torture tactics were designed to obtain false confessions, we have to conclude that the reason is to get the evidence they wouldn't otherwise have. Libi gives up an Iraq-al Qaeda link that the White House KNOWS is false; then they use it as evidence. They want to gather the information they already have in their fantasy vision of the world to justify future attacks and future wars. It's really brutally simple.