How Bush's Torture Helped al-Qaeda
By Robert Parry
April 23, 2009
Captured al-Qaeda operatives, facing the threat or reality of torture, appear to have fed the Bush administration’s obsession about Iraq, buying Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders time to rebuild their organization inside nuclear-armed Pakistan. Even now, as al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies expand their power ever closer to Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, ex-Bush administration officials continue to insist they protected U.S. security by repeatedly waterboarding the likes of 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and terrifying others, such as Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, with “extraordinary renditions” to foreign countries known to torture.
However, the emerging evidence, including recently released Justice Department memos, suggests that
the “high-value detainees” may have helped divert U.S. focus away from their al-Qaeda colleagues by providing tantalizing misinformation about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and dropping tidbits about Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who operated inside Iraq..........................
As former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora told the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2008, “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that
the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”....................
So, the
“enhanced interrogations techniques” may have had
two deadly consequences:
***eliciting misinformation that helped lead the United States into the quicksand of Iraq
(while al-Qaeda and its Islamic fundamentalist allies strengthened their position in nuclear-armed Pakistan)
***and contributing significantly to the deaths of more than 4,200 American soldiers in Iraq.more at:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/042209.html
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