Stranger, and Scarier Than Fiction

Someone tell me if I’m just allowing the media to create a dastardly plot out of little bits and pieces of fact.

Here’s the crazy conspiracy that is starting to emerge out of the whole torture issue from the Bush days:

The “enhanced interrogation” program was started soon after 9/11 and around the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.  The CIA and the Pentagon both got the same orders on how to proceed with interrogating suspects, and the Justice Department wrote legal opinions about how to interpret the law in a way that would make these “enhanced” techniques to be legal (aka. technically not torture, which is unequivocally illegal under both U.S. and international law).

This info is now a matter of public record, with documents being declassified by the Obama administration and a new Armed Services Committee report on the military’s interrogation programs.  Both are the same in their direction, and so they came from the one place that would have the authority to make these policy choices: the White House.  Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney and even Bush not only knew about it, but actively orchestrated this new, slightly different, definition of what constituted torture, with the Department of Justice providing them the legal firewall to protect them from any pesky investigations or lawsuits that might interfere with the “War on Terror.”

We know that this all happened, and only certain bits and pieces lack complete proof (meaning documentation, video, semen samples).  We also know that the politicization of the Justice Department was occurring, and that the administration was blocking congressional oversight committees from being able to do anything about this issue.  For instance, Nancy Pelosi recently revealed that while on the House Judiciary Committee, she was legally unable to voice concerns about the interrogation program because it was still classified information; at that time, they were told that these advanced techniques were NOT being used, which was a lie, and she could not even talk to her staff about it without being charged with violating national security.

This all points to pretty heavy overreach by the Executive Branch…but now the rabbit hole goes even deeper.

Here’s the new wrinkle: Apparently military interrogation trainers were contacted by the administration and asked specifically about techniques that were used while training our military personnel to resist enemy interrogation attempts should they ever be captured.  These trainers would provide simulated interrogation scenarios, which include waterboarding, since these are techniques commonly used by foreign captors to force Americans into confessing to crimes they did not commit, which would then be used as propaganda.  It’s happened in Vietnam, Kosovo, and even in Iraq.

Why would the military be asked about techniques that were often used to coerce people into false confessions, and then start using those exact techniques on actual detainees, all under the guise of securing life-saving intelligence?  If it’s already conventional wisdom that these borderline torturous techniques often yielded bad intelligence, why would they make those techniques standard?

The new murmur is that this “bad intelligence” was actually the point.  At the same time American intelligence guys started torturing captured terrorists, and alleged terrorists, the administration was looking for the justifications to go to war in Iraq.  When the search for WMD’s didn’t pan out, the gears shifted to finding links between Saddam’s regime and Al Qieda.  That meant finding those links by any means necessary, and waterboarding a guy almost 200 times is enough to get him to say whatever the hell you want.

Right now there is not enough declassified material that demonstrates what exactly was gained from using interrogation methods that are now officially considered torture by the current administration.  Did they help foil any actual plots?  But more importantly, did any detainees reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and terrorist organizations after being subjected to these methods?

This is what it all boils down to: It may be that the Bush administration politicized the Justice Department (which is against the law), then bent existing laws against torture (an action that made many officials nervous) in order to give our intelligence operatives permission to force out confessions, and essentially fabricate intelligence that could then be used to justify the war in Iraq.

Did you catch all of that?  Here’s the gist once more: Let’s legalize torture in order to package and sell the war in Iraq.

I don’t know yet that this is the complete and utter truth, because it sounds almost too conspiratorial to be taken seriously.  But I didn’t make any of this up, and there is now enough evidence to make the Attorney General consider putting a special investigator on the case.  The lead up to the war in Iraq was a total con by the Bush administration, and I believe that after pouring over the mountain of work done by journalists.  Now, however, there may be a direct link between prewar intelligence and Bush’s torture program.

That means actual War Crimes committed by the former administration: The intent to begin a war on false pretenses with direct evidence of falsified intelligence, and culpability may lead right to the office of the President himself. If our nation is to ever regain its moral authority, we have to find out the complete truth behind this no matter how ugly it turns out to be.  It was the same story in Vietnam, and it was allowed to happen in Iraq.  We need to fix our system once and for all, otherwise it will happen again.