U.S. Tortured and Killed Innocent People for the Specific Purpose of Producing False Propaganda

Source: washingtonsblog.com

>>When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.”Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .<<

U.S. Used C-O-M-M-U-N-I-S-T Techniques Specially Designed to Produced F-A-L-S-E Confessions

It has long been known by interrogation experts that torture creates false confessions. For example:

• The C.I.A.’s 1963 interrogation manual stated:

Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex ‘admissions’ that take still longer to disprove.

• Neuroscientists have found that torture physically and chemically interferes with the prisoner’s ability to tell the truth

• An Army psychologist – Major Paul Burney, Army’s Behavior Science Consulting Team psychologist – said (page 78 & 83):

was stressed to me time and time again that psychological investigations have proven that harsh interrogations do not work. At best it will get you information that a prisoner thinks you want to hear to make the interrogation stop, but that information is strongly likely to be false.

• The national security adviser to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush (Donald P. Gregg) wrote:

During wartime service with the CIA in Vietnam from 1970 to 1972, I was in charge of intelligence operations in the 10 provinces surrounding Saigon. One of my tasks was to prevent rocket attacks on Saigon’s port.Keeping Saigon safe required human intelligence, most often from captured prisoners. I had a running debate about how North Vietnamese prisoners should be treated with the South Vietnamese colonel who conducted interrogations. This colonel routinely tortured prisoners, producing a flood of information, much of it totally false.

Senator John McCain explains, based upon his own years of torture:

I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners sometimes produces good intelligence but often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering. Often, information provided to stop the torture is deliberately misleading.

• And a former CIA analyst notes:

During the Inquisition there were many confessed witches, and many others were named by those tortured as other witches.

The above is true for all torture.

But the specific type of torture used by the U.S. last decade is even worse …  it was a systematic program of torture specially designed in order to intentionally create false confessions.

Indeed, the entire purpose behind the U.S. torture program was to obtain false confessions.

And the torture techniques used were in fact COMMUNIST techniques specifically designed to produce false confessions.

Senator Levin, in commenting on a Senate Armed Services Committee report on torture in 2009,dropped the following bombshell:

With last week’s release of the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, it is now widely known that Bush administration officials distorted Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape “SERE” training – a legitimate program used by the military to train our troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations – by authorizing abusive techniques from SERE for use in detainee interrogations. Those decisions conveyed the message that abusive treatment was appropriate for detainees in U.S. custody. They were also an affront to the values articulated by General Petraeus.

In SERE training, U.S. troops are briefly exposed, in a highly controlled setting, to abusive interrogation techniques used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions. The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. Until recently, the Navy SERE school also used waterboarding. The purpose of the SERE program is to provide U.S. troops who might be captured a taste of the treatment they might face so that they might have a better chance of surviving captivity and resisting abusive and coercive interrogations.

Senator Levin then documents that SERE techniques were deployed as part of an official policy on detainees, and that SERE instructors helped to implement the interrogation programs. He noted:

The senior Army SERE psychologist warned in 2002 against using SERE training techniques during interrogations in an email to personnel at Guantanamo Bay, because:

[T]he use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects… When individuals are gradually exposed to increasing levels of discomfort, it is more common for them to resist harder… If individuals are put under enough discomfort, i.e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. This will increase the amount of information they tell the interrogator, but it does not mean the information is accurate. In fact, it usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain… Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low. The likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the level of resistance in a detainee is very high… (p. 53).

McClatchy filled in some of the details:

Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration…

For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document…

When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.”Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

“I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”

Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.

The Washington Post reported the same year:

Despite what you’ve seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.

So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a “ticking time bomb” scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.

***

Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: “Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe.

Indeed, one of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.

As Truthout reported:

Jessen’s notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a “master” SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).

***

Kearns was one of only two officers within DoD qualified to teach all three SERE-related courses within SSTP on a worldwide basis, according to a copy of a 1989 letter written Aldrich, who nominated him officer of the year.

***

The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered – not just ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar,” he said. “What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It isexploitation, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, notinterrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”

***

Jessen wrote that cooperation is the “end goal” of the detainer, who wants the detainee “to see that [the detainer] has ‘total’ control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.).”

***

Kearns said, based on what he has read in declassified government documents and news reports about the role SERE played in the Bush administration’s torture program, Jessen clearly “reverse-engineered” his lesson plan and used resistance methods to abuse “war on terror” detainees.

In a subsequent report, Truthout notes:

Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD’s most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA’s teaching academy, said he immediately knew the true value of the PREAL manual if employed as part of an interrogation program.

“This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence,” Kleinman said in an interview. “If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using.”

***

“In SERE courses, we emphatically presented this interrogation paradigm as one that was employed exclusively by nations that were in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and international treaties against torture,” Kleinman said. “We proudly assured the students that we – the United States – would never resort to such despicable methods.”

(Interrogators also forced detainees to take drugs … which further impaired their ability to tell the truth.)

And false confessions were, in fact, extracted.

For example:

• A humanitarian aid worker said: torture only stopped when I pretended I was in Al Qaeda

• Under torture, Libyan Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi falsely claimed there was a link between Saddam Hussein, al-Qaida and WMD

• President Bush mentioned Abu Zubaydah as a success story, where torture saved lives. Zubaydah was suspected of being a high-ranking al-Qaida leader. Bush administration officials claimed Zubaydah told them that al-Qaida had links with Saddam Hussein. He also claimed there was a plot to attack Washington with a “dirty bomb”. Both claims are now recognized to be false, even by the CIA, which also admits he was never a member of al-Qaida.

• One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ

• The so-called 9/11 mastermind said: “During … my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear” (the self-confessed 9/11 “mastermind” falsely confessed to crimes he didn’t commit)

And the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees. And the government went to great lengths to obstruct justice and hide unflattering facts from the Commission.

According to NBC News:

• Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured

• At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”

• The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves

Details here.

How the BBC whitewashes mass murder and war crimes in Iraq

Source: stopwar.org.uk

“The truth,” US historian Howard Zinn once wrote, “is so often the reverse of what has been told us by our culture that we cannot turn our heads far enough around to see it.”

A recent article by the BBC’s Paul Wood titled “Iraq’s hardest fight: The US battle for Fallujah 2004” perfectly illustrates Zinn’s truism.

Wood, an award-winning foreign correspondent, was writing about the 10th anniversary of the US assault on Fallujah, when he was embedded with US marines attacking the Iraqi city.

For Wood the story begins on March 31 2004, when four US private security contractors were ambushed in the centre of the city, killed, burned and strung up from a bridge.

In response the US launched its first attack in April 2004, killing approximately 800 people, including around 300 women and children, before its forces were ordered to pull back in the face of protests across Iraq and the world.

What Wood doesn’t mention is tensions in the city had been running high since April 2003 when US soldiers killed 17 protesters during a demonstration about US troops being stationed in a school.

In the days before the lynching of the private security contractors the US military had conducted a “sweep” through the city. During this operation, the Observer reported that at least six Iraqi civilians were killed, including an 11-year-old boy.

Speaking about the aftermath of the first US attack, Wood repeats the official narrative of the US military, claiming that “Fallujah became a safe haven for al Qaida.”

In contrast Fadhil Badrani, an Iraqi journalist and resident of Fallujah who reported regularly for Reuters, wrote an article for the BBC News website in which he noted: “I am not aware of any foreign fighters in Fallujah.”

Turning to the second US assault in November 2004, Wood makes the following, highly misleading statement: “Most of the people had left Fallujah… the image of a city packed with non-combatants being pounded with artillery and white phosphorus was wrong.”

In reality, when the US attack began on November 8 2004 the American Forces Press Service reported that out of a total population of 300,000 “officials estimate that between 50,000 and 60,000 people are left in the city.”

According to the New York Times, just before the US forces moved into Fallujah “heavy artillery could be heard pounding positions in or near the city every few minutes. An entire apartment complex was ground into rubble. A train station was obliterated in a hail of 2,000-pound bombs.”

The Washington Post reported the US military used white phosphorus during the fighting, a fact confirmed by a 2005 edition of Field Artillery magazine, the official publication of the US Army Field Artillery Corps.

While Wood’s words are a classic example of a journalist echoing US propaganda, arguably it is what he chooses not to mention that is most shocking.

Contemporary news reports and subsequent commentary confirm that the US committed a number of war crimes in Fallujah. Prior to the attack, the Washington Post reported that US forces cut off Fallujah’s water and electricity supply.

This contravened the Geneva Conventions which states the “starvation of civilians as a method of combat is prohibited” and led to predictable results. Rasoul Ibrahim, who fled the fighting, said: “There’s no water. People are drinking dirty water. Children are dying.”

The New York Times reported that within an hour of the start of the ground attack, US troops seized the Fallujah General Hospital: “Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs.”

Quoting an Iraqi doctor, the Independent reported that a US air strike had destroyed an emergency clinic killing 20 doctors. The Geneva Conventions state that medical establishments “may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the parties to the conflict.”

US forces blocked aid convoys from reaching Fallujah, only letting them enter after five days of fighting. “From a humanitarian point of view, it is a disaster, there is no other way to describe it,” Firdoos al-Ubaidi from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society said on November 10 2004.

“We have asked for permission from the Americans to go into the city and help the people there, but we haven’t heard anything back from them.”

At the same time they were stopping help getting to the city, US forces were preventing military-aged males from leaving.

“Hundreds of men trying to flee the assault on Fallujah have been turned back by US troops following orders to allow only women, children and the elderly to leave,” the Associated Press reported.

James Ross, senior legal advisor to Human Rights Watch, said that returning unarmed men to the war zone “would be a war crime.”

Those unable to escape Fallujah had to contend with US forces implementing “a strict night-time shoot-to-kill curfew” with “anyone spotted in the soldiers’ night vision sights… shot,” according to the Times.

Patrick Cockburn, the Independent’s veteran Middle East correspondent, wrote: “US commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops.”

The outcome of this unrestrained violence was 800 dead in the first week of fighting, according to one Red Cross official. In January 2005, the director of the main hospital told the UN that 700 bodies — including 550 women and children — had been recovered from just a third of the city’s neighbourhoods.

Local authorities said about 60 percent of all houses in the city were totally destroyed or seriously damaged while the Fallujah Compensation Committee reported that 9,000 shops, 65 mosques, 60 schools and a heritage library had been demolished. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced.

In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, US academic Edward Herman penned his seminal essay The Banality of Evil about the normalisation of “ugly, degrading, murderous and unspeakable acts.”

According to Herman “there is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals,” while “it is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.’’

We in the West should be deeply ashamed and angry about what our armed forces did to Fallujah in 2004 — described as “our Guernica” by the Guardian’s Jonathan Steele and independent journalist Dahr Jamail.

Instead, what we get is Wood’s embedded puff piece complete with a sub-heading referring to when “US troops and coalition forces fought their deadliest battle since the Vietnam war.”

If Emily Thornberry MP has to step down from the shadow cabinet for tweeting a photo of a house decked out with English flags, then Wood should definitely go for his whitewashing of US war crimes in Iraq.

Source: Morning Star

Poll: 70% of troops say no more boots on the ground in Iraq

SOURCE: MILITARY TIMES

As the tide of war rises again in the Middle East, the military’s rank and file are mostly opposed to expanding the new mission in Iraq and Syria to include sending a large number of U.S. ground troops into combat, according to a Military Times survey of active-duty members.

On the surface, troops appear to support President Obama’s repeated vows not to let the U.S. military get “dragged into another ground war” in Iraq. Yet at the same time, the views of many service members are shaped by a deep ambivalence about this commander in chief and questions about his ability to lead the nation through a major war, according to the survey and interviews.

The reader survey asked more than 2,200 active-duty troops this question: “In your opinion, do you think the U.S. military should send a substantial number of combat troops to Iraq to support the Iraqi security forces?” Slightly more than 70 percent responded: “No.”

“It’s their country, it’s their business. I don’t think major ‘boots on the ground’ is the right answer,” said one Army infantry officer and prior-enlisted soldier who deployed to Iraq three times. He responded to the survey and an interview request but, like several other service members in this story, asked not to be named because he is not authorized to discuss high-level military policy.

The Military Times survey was conducted online this summer and concluded in August just as President Obama was ramping up the air campaign against the Islamic State group.

Read More... 

Imperial Crusade #989: ‘As Bad as a Crime, a Blunder'

Source: LewRockwell.com

Having nearly provoked war over Ukraine with nuclear-armed Russia, the Obama administration has now launched a full-scale crusade in Iraq and Syria against the evil Saracens of ISIS.

America’s aerial might, including B-1 heavy bombers, is plastering ISIS miscreants. Washington’s Arab allies and  rightwing governments in Canada and Australia have joined the fray. The British will be next.

ISIS reserved particular venom for the French, referring to them as “dirty, spiteful” French (the Brits will love this one) whose warplanes joined the bombing crusade.

The new plan seems to be: “Kill’em all and let God sort them out,” a Vietnam-era slogan echoing the original from the Middle Ages.

The real problem is that the White House’s strategy looks like it’s being run by two angry women, Susan Rice and UN ambassador Samantha Power. Neither they nor President Barack Obama seems to have any grasp of military or geopolitical strategy. It’s amateur hour driven by a frenzy of alarmist hysteria from politicians and the media.

Iran’s president put it perfectly when he called America’s new Syria-Iraq a “blunder,” adding “certain intelligence agencies have put blades in the hands of madmen, who now spare no one.”

While the US is cooking up a new, bigger mess in the Levant, the old mess in Afghanistan only gets worse. Last week, Washington’s colonial bureau finally managed to cobble together a political deal in Afghanistan between two rivals for the presidency, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah.

Ashraf Ghani is Washington’s choice for president; Abdullah will act as ‘chief executive,’ a newly created role of prime minister sure to break down. To no surprise, they are expected to quickly sign an agreement to keep 25,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan for years to come.

Outgoing Afghan president Hamid Karzai, installed in office by the CIA soon after the 2001 US invasion, loosed a Parthian shaft at his former American allies, asserting they did not want peace in Afghanistan, rather ongoing occupation.

Karzai, who has emerged as a genuine nationalist, has stated that the only thing the US and its allies accomplished in Afghanistan was to kill large numbers of civilians.

Over in Iraq, former prime minister Nouri Maliki, another CIA-installed “asset,” also refused to sign a pact allowing long-term garrisoning by US troops. So out he went. Now Karazi joins Maliki, recalling Henry Kissinger’s quip that it’s more dangerous being America’s ally than its enemy.

The US may shuffle the deck in Afghanistan, but its basic problems remain. Ghani, a former academic and banker, is a decent person, but he is far too westernized, has little support among majority Pashtuns, and is widely seen as a willing American collaborator and sock puppet.

His erstwhile rival, Abdullah Abdullah, is the front-man for the Northern Alliance, a Tajik gang from the Panjshir Valley that was a Soviet ally when Moscow occupied Afghanistan.

The Uzbek warlord, Rashid Dostam, a major war criminal and Soviet collaborator, joined the Northern Alliance and became its strongman.  

The Northern Alliance collaborated with the US after its invasion, just as Tajiks and Uzbeks had done with the Soviets.  Afghanistan’s communists gained control of the brutal national intelligence service, interior ministry, police, and foreign affairs.  But their main business remained narcotics.

Taliban virtually eliminated Afghanistan’s drug trade save in the region controlled by the Northern Alliance.  Today, Afghanistan’s drug production and exports have reached what the UN calls “record highs.”

The US remains the proud owner of the world’s leading producer of heroin. The drug lords that kept Karzai in power are all close US allies. But no one in Washington cares to talk about the dirty underside of Afghan politics or how its government runs on drug money. Foreign aid is the only other source of government income.

Most Pashtuns detest the suave Abdullah Abdullah and his fellow Tajiks. For their part, Tajiks look down on Pashtun as backwards mountaineers. Everyone mistrusts the minority Uzbek and Hazara, both of whom also collaborated with the US occupation or Iran.

Taliban, Afghanistan’s most popular and authentic political movement, is predominantly Pashtun. Washington’s refusal to talk directly to the demonized Taliban ensures that there will be no real political compromise in wretched Afghanistan, which has been at war for the past 35 years.

The half-forgotten Afghan War has cost the US close to 2,500 dead, 17,000 wounded and over $1 trillion.  The “reconstructed” Afghan army will be as likely to collapse without direct US support as was Iraq’s army, three divisions of which ran away at first contact with ISIS fighters.

So why does Washington keep pumping billions into Afghanistan, which has no oil? Because, in keeping with imperial logic and strategy, it remains the best pipeline route to export the oil riches of the Caspian Basin south to Karachi on the Arabian Sea. And because Afghanistan overwatches Central Asia, where China is increasingly active.

Lastly, because the mighty US military industrial complex cannot accept being defeated by Pashtun tribesmen. Nor can the American, Canadian, British, and French politicians who sent their soldiers to fight and die in this useless war.