Excerpted, re-reported, edited by Carolyn Bennett

Torture until Detainee Parrots Torturer Dictates¯
To make Torture Stop

Former Bush Administration staffer Lawrence Wilkerson in May 2009: “What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002¯well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion—its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the United States but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

“So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to [then-Vice President Richard] Cheney’s office that their detainee ‘was compliant’ (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods [torture]. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, ‘revealed’ such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.”

Reuters reported on May 11, 2009, from Tripoli: “A Libyan Islamist whose fabricated testimony about al Qaeda was used by the United States to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq has killed himself in his Libyan jail cell, a Libyan newspaper reported on Monday. Human rights groups in the West demanded an immediate investigation into the death of Ali Mohamed Abdelaziz al Fakhiri, 46, also known as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi and a key figure in U.S. intelligence reports on al Qaeda before the war.”

Detainee innocence unimportant from Afghanistan to Iraq ¯ Wilkerson in March 2009: “… [The] ad hoc intelligence philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people [was] called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib).

All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from [a detainee] and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals—in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals¯that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified. Thus as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees’ innocence was inconsequential.

“After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.”

Endless War Built, Sustained on Cycles of
U.S. Detention, Torture-Made Evidence
American Fear
Foreign Resistance, Retaliation

Wilkerson continued: “[The Bush Administration’s] ultimate cover was that the struggle in which they were involved was war and in war those detained could be kept for the duration. And this war¯by their own pronouncements— had no end. For political purposes, they knew it certainly had no end within their allotted four to eight years. Moreover, [war’s] not having an end, properly exploited, would help ensure their eight rather than four years in office.”

But “Al-Qa’ida will be back,” Wilkerson continued. “Iraq, GITMO, Abu Ghraib, heavily-biased U.S. support for Israel, and a host of other strategic errors have insured al-Qa’ida's resilience, staying power and motivation. How we deal with the future attacks of this organization and its cohorts could well seal our fate, for good or bad. Osama bin Laden and his brain trust, Aman al-Zawahiri, are counting on us to produce the bad. With people such as Cheney assisting them, they are far more likely to succeed.”

Sources
Deep Journal, “Lawrence Wilkerson Drops an Iraq-Torture Bombshell (video accompanies article by Bob Fertik) on Wednesday, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson dropped a bombshell, May 14, 2009, Deep Journal http://www.deepjournal.com/p/7/a/en/1984.html

Washington Note “Guest Post by Lawrence Wilkerson: Some Truths about Guantanamo Bay,”
Tuesday, March 17 2009, 7:27PM, http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/03/some_truths_abo/
Lawrence B. Wilkerson was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and is chairman of the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba 21st Century Policy Initiative.

Reuters, “Libya reports prison suicide of top Qaeda man,” May 11, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE54A4WU20090511

Labels: Ali Mohamed Abdelaziz al Fakhiri, endless war, George W. Bush, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, Lawrence Wilkerson, Richard Cheney, torture and innocence, U.S. torture policies and practices, war on terror

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Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett -author, independent journalist Blog: Today's Insight News Blog: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/
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