GEORGIE'S NEW BOOK GOING BELLY UP

You know what? Never mind.

The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies
Of George W. Bush's Memoir

FROM: The Huffington Post ~
By Dan Froomkin

WASHINGTON

These days, when we think of George W. Bush,
we think mostly of what a horrible mess he made
of the economy. But his even more tragic legacy
is the loss of our moral authority, and the
transformation of the United States of America
from global champion of human rights into
an outlaw nation.

History is likely to judge Bush most harshly
for two things in particular: Launching a war
against a country that had not attacked us, and
approving the use of cruel and inhumane
interrogation techniques.

And that's why the two most essential lies --
among the many -- in his new memoir are that
he had a legitimate reason to invade Iraq, and
that he had a legitimate reason to torture
detainees.

Neither is remotely true. But Bush must figure
that if he keeps making the case for himself --
particularly if it goes largely unrebutted by the
traditional media, as it has thus far -- then
perhaps he can blunt history's verdict.

It may even be working. Extrapolating from the
response to the book, former vice president
Dick Cheney on Tuesday told a crowd
gathered for Bush's presidential library ground
breaking in Dallas that "judgments are a little
more measured than they were" and that "history
is coming around."

The 'Decision' to Go to War

In "Decision Points," Bush describes the
invasion of Iraq as something he came to
support only reluctantly and after a long period
of reflection. This is a flat-out lie.

Anyone who paid any attention to the news
at the time knew Bush was dead-set on war
long before he sent in the troops in March
2003. And there is now an abundant amount
of documentation, in the form of leaks,
unclassified memos, witness interviews and
other people's memoirs to prove it.

The historical record clearly shows that Bush
had long harbored a desire to strike out at
Saddam Hussein, was trying to link Iraq to
9/11 within a day of the terrorist attacks, and
finally found the excuse he was looking for
in skewed intelligence about alleged Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction.

The only real question is whether he actively
deceived the American public and the world
-- or whether he was so passionate about
selling the public on the war that he
intentionally blinded himself to how brazenly
Vice President Cheney had politicized and
abused the intelligence process.

Bush repeatedly insists in his memoir that
he tried to avoid war. He describes his
preferred approach to Iraq as "coercive
diplomacy" and tries to explain away the
military planning, the troop movements
and the constant saber-rattling as being
intended primarily to scare Saddam into
"disarming". He even tries to retroactively
justify one of his notoriously long vacations
by suggesting that he needed the time to think.
"I spent much of August 2002 in Crawford,
a good place to reflect on the next decision
I faced: how to move forward on the
diplomatic track," he writes.

In an interview with NBC's Matt Lauer aired
on Nov. 8, Bush declared, "I gave diplomacy
every chance to work." But as David Corn
put it ever so succinctly on Politics Daily,
that is a "super-sized whopper." U.N.
weapons inspectors had found nothing and
were getting more cooperation from the Iraqi
government just prior to the invasion. And
Corn offered up one particularly telling
anecdote from the book he co-authored,
"Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal,
and the Selling of the Iraq War": On May
1, 2002 -- almost a year prior to the invasion
-- Bush told press secretary Ari Fleischer
of Saddam, "I'm going to kick his sorry
mother****ing ass all over the Mideast."

Bush writes in his memoir that the idea
of attacking Iraq came up at a meeting of his
national security team at Camp David, four
days after the 9/11 attacks. By his account,
it was then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz who "suggested that we consider
confronting Iraq as well as the Taliban."
Bush writes that he eventually decided that
"[u]nless I received definitive evidence tying
Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 plot I would
work to resolve the Iraq problem
diplomatically."

But that's a hugely disingenuous version of
events. It didn't take Wolfowitz and four
days after 9/11 for the idea of attacking Iraq
to occur to Bush. As the 9/11 Commission
report documented: "President Bush had
wondered immediately after the attack
whether Saddam Hussein's regime might
have had a hand in it."

In the first tell-all book from inside Bush's
national security team, Richard A. Clarke
wrote in 2004 of a meeting he had with Bush
the day after 9/11:

The president in a very intimidating way left
us, me and my staff, with the clear indication
that he wanted us to come back with the
word there was an Iraqi hand behind 9/11
because they had been planning to do
something about Iraq from before the time
they came into office....

I think they had a plan from day one they
wanted to do something about Iraq. While
the World Trade Center was still smoldering,
while they were still digging bodies out,
people in the White House were thinking: '
Ah! This gives us the opportunity we have
been looking for to go after Iraq.'

Clarke notes that the following day, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld complained in
a meeting that there were no decent targets
for bombing in Afghanistan and that the U.S.
should consider bombing Iraq, which had
better targets.

At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But
he was serious and the President did not
reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq.
Instead, he noted that what we needed to do
with Iraq was to change the government, not
just hit it with more cruise missiles, as
Rumsfeld had implied.

Just over two months later, on Nov. 21,
2001, Bush formally instructed Rumsfeld
that he wanted to develop a plan for war
in Iraq. Sixteen months after that, in March
2003, the invasion began.

In the period during which Bush claims he
was wringing his hands about whether or
not to attack, he and his aides were instead
intensely focused on building the public
case for what was, in their minds,
an inevitability.

The first concrete bits of evidence to that
effect were the Downing Street Memos,
first published in May 1, 2005, which
documented the conclusions of British
officials after high-level talks in Washington
in July 2002:

Military action was now seen as inevitable.
Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through
military action, justified by the conjunction
of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy.

And just recently, the independent National
Security Archives completed a major
analysis of the historical record, including
a new trove of formerly secret records of
both the Bush administration and the British
cabinet of Tony Blair. John Prados,
co-director of the archives' Iraq
Documentation Project, summed up their
findings this way: "The more we learn about
how the Iraq War began the worse the story
gets."

Prados wrote that the cumulative record
clearly "demonstrates that the Bush
administration swiftly abandoned plans
for diplomacy to curb fancied Iraqi
adventurism by means of sanctions, never
had a plan subsequent to that except for
a military solution, and enmeshed British allies
in a manipulation of public opinion on both
sides of the Atlantic designed to generate
support for a war."

That's right: There never was another plan.
And therefore -- ironically enough, considering
the title of Bush's book -- there never was an
actual "decision point" either. There were
some debates about how to invade Iraq, and
when, but not if.
Prados writes:

In contrast to an extensive record of planning
for actual military operations, there is no
record that President George W. Bush ever
made a considered decision for war. All of
the numerous White House and Pentagon
meetings concerned moving the project
forward, not whether a march into conflict
was a proper course for the United States and
its allies. Deliberations were instrumental to
furthering the war project, not considerations
of the basic course.

Former CIA director George Tenet admitted
as much in his own memoir, in 2007. "There
was never a serious debate that I know of
within the administration about the imminence
of the Iraqi threat," he wrote, nor "was there
ever a significant discussion" about the
possibility of containing Iraq without an
invasion.

And in June 2008, Senate Intelligence
Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller
described the conclusions of his committee's
exhaustive report on the Bush administration's
public statements regarding Iraq:

Before taking the country to war, this
Administration owed it to the American
people to give them a 100 percent accurate
picture of the threat we faced.

Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded
that the Administration made significant claims
that were not supported by the intelligence.
In making the case for war, the Administration
repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when
in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted,
or even non-existent. As a result, the American
people were led to believe that the threat from
Iraq was much greater than actually existed.

It is my belief that the Bush Administration was
fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by
al Qaeda as justification for overthrowing
Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top
Administration officials made repeated
statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qaeda
as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played
a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration
led the nation into war under false pretenses.

There is no question we all relied on flawed
intelligence. But, there is a fundamental
difference between relying on incorrect
intelligence and deliberately painting a picture
to the American people that you know is not
fully accurate.

It was, in short, a propaganda campaign.
As former Press Secretary Scott McClellan
wrote in his revelatory 2008 memoir, Bush's
advisors "decided to pursue a political
propaganda campaign to sell the war to the
American people.... A pro-war campaign might
have been more acceptable had it been
accompanied by a high level of candor and
honesty, but it was not."

And as Jonathan Landay wrote for Knight
Ridder in 2005, the materials that had become
public to date demonstrated "that the White
House followed a pattern of using questionable
intelligence, even documents that turned out to
be forgeries, to support its case -- often leaking
classified information to receptive journalists --
and dismissing information that undermined
the case for war."

That's what made Patrick Fitzgerald's prosecution
of the Valerie Plame case so essential. It promised
a public view into the heart of the administration's
dirty tricks department -- and a chance to find
out once and for all who the mastermind was.

But Cheney aide Scooter Libby's lies stymied
Fitzgerald, and we never found out for sure --
even though the signs pointed pretty clearly to
Libby's boss.

Even if Cheney was the driving force behind
the war campaign's deceptions, however, Bush
was undeniably the chief cheerleader.

Precisely to what extent pressure from the
White House was responsible for the intelligence
community's totally inaccurate assessment of
Iraq's WMDs remains unclear. Bush's own
WMD commission, not surprisingly, gave him
a pass in their final report. But there was no
doubt the community knew what its chief
customers wanted to hear, and gave it to them.

Even so, the intelligence did not support
Bush's insistence at the time that those weapons
posed an imminent threat.

Paul R. Pillar, the intelligence community's
former senior analyst for the Middle East,
wrote in 2006 that it was only through the overt,
intentional misreading, cherry-picking and
politicization of intelligence findings that the
case could be made for war:

If the entire body of official intelligence analysis
on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid
war - or, if war was going to be launched,
to prepare for a messy aftermath. What is most
remarkable about prewar US intelligence on Iraq
is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled
policymakers; it is that it played so small a role
in one of the most important US policy decisions
in recent decades.

Intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs did not
drive Bush's decision to go to war, Pillar
continued:

A view broadly held in the United States and
even more so overseas was that deterrence of
Iraq was working, that Saddam was being kept
"in his box," and that the best way to deal with
the weapons problem was through an aggressive
inspections program to supplement the sanctions
already in place. That the administration arrived
at so different a policy solution indicates that its
decision to topple Saddam was driven by other
factors.

For Bush, the intelligence findings Cheney and
others were feeding him -- and the media -- were
not factors that needed to be weighed carefully
as part of a decision-making process. There
was no decision-making process. The intelligence
findings were simply elements of a sales
campaign.

The one time Bush is recorded as having pushed
back at the intelligence at all was in the famous
late 2002 Oval Office scene with Tenet. However,
contrary to popular mythology, Bush's concern
was manifestly not about the intelligence itself, but
about its marketing potential.

When Tenet exclaimed "It's a slam dunk case!"
it was in the context of the case to be made to the
public.

In the memoir, Bush himself recalls having declared:
"Surely we can do a better job of explaining the
evidence against Saddam."

Bush writes in the memoir: "No one was more
shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find
weapons of mass destruction. I had a sickening
feeling every time I thought about it. I still do."

But as David Corn also points out Bush famously
treated the missing WMDs like a big joke at
a March 2004 press dinner. "Those weapons of
mass destruction have got to be somewhere," he
said as he narrated a slideshow of pictures of him
looking out his window and under his furniture.

And Bush of course never actually tells us who
he's angry at, or what exactly sickened him. He's
certainly not willing to say that he was angry
at himself, or that going to war was a sickening
mistake.

LAUER: Was there ever any consideration
of apologizing to the American people?
BUSH: I mean, apologizing would basically
say the decision was a wrong decision, and
I don't believe it was a wrong decision.

In fact, despite everything, Bush continues
to indulge in the same unfounded rhetoric to
this day"For all the difficulties that followed,
America is safer without a homicidal dictator
pursuing WMD and supporting terror at the
heart of the Middle East," he writes.

And the cherry-picking of the intelligence
continues, as well. As Walter Pincus wrote
on Monday (in a story the Washington Post
buried on page A29), the book "makes selective
use" of a Jan. 27, 2003, report to the U.N.
Security Council by chief inspector Hans Blix,
"citing elements that support the idea that
Hussein was not cooperating and leaving out
parts that indicate his government was. More
to the point, however, Bush fails to mention
two subsequent Blix pre-invasion reports in
February and early March, weeks before U.S.
bombs struck Baghdad. Those show Iraq
cooperating with inspectors and the inspectors
finding no significant evidence that Hussein was
hiding WMD programs."

George W. Bush was no reluctant warrior.
The U.S. went to war in Iraq because he wanted
to. The war he launched was arguably an illegal
act of aggression. And the costs have been
enormous.

The United States has spent $750 billion and
counting on the war in Iraq. More than 4,400
members of the U.S. armed forces have perished,
with nearly 32,000 wounded in action, and
somewhere in the ballpark of 500,000 more
suffering from brain injuries, mental health
problems, hearing damage and disease. Iraqi
civilian deaths are estimated to number at least
100,000 and more than a million Iraqis have been
displaced from their homes.

Bush told Lauer it was worth it: "I will say,
definitely, the world is better off without
Saddam Hussein in power, as are 25 million
people who now have a chance to live in
freedom."

But author Nir Rosen recently addressed
Bush's claim:

Certainly the hundreds of thousands of dead
Iraqis are not better off. Their families aren't
better off. The tens of thousands of Iraqi men
who languished in American and subsequently
Iraqi gulags are not better off. The children who
lost their fathers aren't better off. The millions
of Iraqis who lost their homes, hundreds
of thousands of refugees in the region, are not
better off. So there's no mathematical calculation
you can make to determine who's better off and
who's not.....

Saddam Hussein is gone, that's true.
The regime we've put in place is certainly more
representative, but it's brutal and authoritarian.
Torture is routine and systematic. Corruption
is also routine and systematic. There are no
services to speak of, no real electricity or water.
Violence remains very high. So, there's nothing
to be proud of in this. The Iraqi people deserve
much better, and they're the real victims of Bush's
war.

In what was perhaps the single most
preposterous assertion of his book tour, Bush
seemed to suggest to Lauer that he was actually
against going to war:

LAUER: So by the time you gave the order
to start military operations in Iraq, did you
personally have any doubt, any shred of
doubt, about that intelligence?
BUSH: No, I didn't. I really didn't.
LAUER: Not everybody thought you should
go to war, though. There were dissenters.
BUSH: Of course there were.
LAUER: Did you filter them out?
BUSH: I was -- I was a dissenting voice.
I didn't wanna use force.

For the nation's journalists to allow this
outrageous lie to go uncontested is particularly
galling. During the run-up to war, one of the
elite media's most common excuses for
marginalizing or ignoring the true voices
of dissension and doubt was that everyone
knew an invasion was a foregone conclusion.

The result back then was that instead
of watchdog journalism, what we got was
credulous, stenographic recitation of the
administration's deeply flawed arguments for
war. Or, as former Washington Post executive
editor Len Downie told Howard Kurtz in 2004:
In retrospect, "we were so focused on trying
to figure out what the administration was doing
that we were not giving the same play to people
who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to
war and were questioning the administration's
rationale."

Today's journalists would like to think they
have learned some lessons from their poor
pre-war conduct. But letting Bush get away
now with saying the exact opposite of what they
knew to be true even at the time -- and what has
since been amply confirmed by the historical
record -- would be yet another major victory
of stenography over accountability.

The Embrace Of Torture

That torture is even a subject of debate today
is a testament to the devastating effect the Bush
administration has had on our concept of
morality.

And in his book and on his book tour, far
from hanging his head in shame, Bush is more
explicit and enthusiastic than ever before
endorsing one of torture's iconic forms.
"Damn right," he quotes himself as saying in
response to a CIA request to waterboard Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed. "Had we captured more
al Qaeda operatives with significant intelligence
value, I would have used the program for them
as well."

Bush's two-part argument is simple; That
waterboarding was legal (i.e., that it was not
really torture); and that it worked.

But neither assertion is remotely true.

Waterboarding -- essentially controlled drowning
-- involves immobilizing someone and pouring
water over their mouth and nose in a way that
makes them choke. It causes great physical and
mental suffering, but leaves no marks.

It's not new; villains and despots have been using
it extract confessions for something like 700
years. The CIA just perfected it.

It is self-evidently, almost definitionally, torture.
The U.S. government had always considered
it torture. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese
officer who waterboarded an American with
war crimes. It is flatly a violation of international
torture conventions.

And as far as I know, no American government
official had ever even suggested it wasn't torture
until a small handful of lawyers in Bush's supine
Justice Department, working under orders from
the vice president, claimed otherwise.

These lawyers drafted a series of memos
so lacking in legal merit -- and so cruel and
inhuman -- that they were retracted and
repudiated even by a later wave of Bush
appointees.

The original "torture memo" from August
1, 2002, for instance, argued that to "rise to
the level of torture" an act had to cause pain "
equivalent to intensity to the pain accompanying
serious physical injury, such as organ failure,
impairment of bodily function, or even death."
Anything short of that, according to the memo,
was OK.

Lauer asked Bush in their interview why he
thought waterboarding was legal.

"Because the lawyer said it was legal," Bush
replied. "He said it did not fall within the
Anti-Torture Act. I'm not a lawyer, but you
gotta trust the judgment of people around
you and I do."

When Lauer raised the possibility that Bush's
lawyers had simply told him what they knew he
wanted to hear, Bush vaguely denied it and
suggested that his book might shed more light
on the topic. But it doesn't, at least not much.
In it, Bush writes:

Department of Justice and CIA lawyers conducted
a careful legal review. They concluded that the
enhanced interrogation program complied with the
Constitution an all applicable laws, including those
that ban torture.

I took a look at the list of techniques. There were
two that I felt went too far, even if they were legal.
I directed the CIA not to use them. Another
technique was waterboarding, a process of
simulated drowning. No doubt the procedure
was tough, but medical experts assured the CIA
that it did not lasting harm.

I knew that an interrogation program this
sensitive and controversial would one day
become public. When it did, we would open
ourselves up to criticism that America had
compromised our moral values. I would have
preferred that we get the information another
way. But the choice between security and values
was real.

Had I not authorized waterboarding on senior
al Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept
a greater risk that the country would be attacked.
In the wake of 9/11, that was a risk I was
unwilling to take. My most solemn responsibility
as president was to protect the country.
I approved the use of the interrogation techniques.

But the choice between security and values was
not real. And this is exactly the reason we have
laws: To prevent people from doing what they
may for some reason think at the moment is
a good idea, but which society has determined
is wrong. No man is above the law. And "the
lawyer said it was legal" is not a sufficient excuse.

As for the claim that torture worked, Bush
writes in the book:

Of the thousands of terrorists we captured in
the years after 9/11, about a hundred were
placed into the CIA program. About a third
of those were questioned using enhanced
techniques. Three were waterboarded.
The information the detainees revealed
constituted more than half of what the CIA
knew about al-Qaeda. Their interrogations
helped break up plots to attack American
military and diplomatic facilities abroad,
Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf in London,
and multiple targets in the United States.

But the only thing we know for sure is that
detainees who were tortured made elaborate
confessions. That, after all, is what torture
is good for. We don't know how much
valuable information they really provided.
We don't know how much of that information
came before they were tortured, rather than
after. We certainly don't know how much
information they would have shared under
proven, standard interrogation techniques.

And under close inspection by investigative
journalists, every one of Bush's specific
assertions about torture having saved lives
has been thoroughly debunked.

The first detainee waterboarded directly on
Bush's orders was Abu Zubaydah, in August
2002.

During his presidency, Bush repeatedly used
Zubaydah as his Exhibit A for torture. In the
book, Bush describes him as a "senior
recruiter and operator" and "trusted associate
of Osama bin Laden."

After CIA interrogators strapped Zubaydah
to the waterboard and suffocated him 83 times
in a month, he broke down. Bush writes:

Zubaydah revealed large amounts of information
on al Qaeda's structure and operations. He also
provided leads that helped reveal the location
of Ramzi bin al Shibh, the logistical planner of
the 9/11 attacks. The Pakistani police picked him
upon the first anniversary of 9/11.

In the book, Bush did not, as he had on
several occasions during his presidency, give
Zubaydah credit for identifying bin al Shibh
as a terror suspect in the first place. That
particular claim was undercut by the fact that,
some four months before Zubaydah was
captured, an FBI indictment detailed bin al Shibh's
alleged involvement in the 9/11 plot.

But what Bush did assert in his memoir was
equally untrue. Investigative journalist Ron
Suskind, in his breakthrough 2006 book,
"The One Percent Doctrine," reported that
the key information about bin al Shibh's
location came not from Zubaydah but from
an al-Jazeera reporter who had interviewed
bin al Shibh at his apartment in Karachi.

And Zubaydah was not a major player.
According to Suskind, he was a mentally ill
travel booker who under CIA torture sent
investigators chasing after false leads about
al Qaeda plots on American nuclear plants,
water systems, shopping malls, banks and
supermarkets.

Almost three years after Suskind's book came
out, the Washington Post confirmed what
Suskind had reported: that "not a single
significant plot was foiled" as a result of
Zubaydah's brutal treatment -- and that his
false confessions "triggered a series of alerts
and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators
scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."

Another detainee waterboarded on Bush's
say-so was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who
stands accused of plotting al Qaeda's bombing
of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

As far as I can tell, Bush has never actually
made any claims about any intelligence
whatsoever reaped from Nashiri's brutal
treatment at the hands of CIA interrogators
in Poland (who, among other things, used
a power drill and a handgun to terrify him.)

The unclassified transcript of Nashiri's
Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearing
in 2007, while redacted to eliminate any
mention of the specific ways in which he was
tortured, indicates that his response was to
tell interrogators whatever they wanted to hear.

Nashiri was asked about his statements about
plans to bomb other American ships, about
a plot to fly a plane and crash it into a ship,
and about bin Laden having a nuclear bomb.

"I just said those things to make the people
happy," he explained. "They were very happy
when I told them those things."

And then there was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, who
the CIA asphyxiated 183 times after Bush so
enthusiastically approved his waterboarding.
Bush writes:

He disclosed plans to attack American targets
with anthrax and directed us to three people
involved in the al Qaeda biological weapons
program. .He provided information that led
to the capture of Hambali, the chief of
al Qaeda's most dangerous affiliate in
Southeast Asia and the architect of the Bali
terrorist attacks that killed 202 people.
He provided further details that led agents
to Hambali's brother, who had been grooming
operatives to carry out another attack inside the
United States, possibly a West Coast version
of 9/11 in which terrorist flew a hijacked plane
into the Library Tower in Los Angeles.

There seems to be little doubt that KSM
provided intelligence of some value (along with
a number of false confessions) -- although he
might have done likewise (minus the false
confessions) in the hands of a skilled
interrogator using traditional methods.

But despite the lengths that the Bush White
House, intelligence officials and various
torture apologists have gone to over the past
several years to help Bush make his case, there
remains not the tiniest shred of evidence to
support his assertion that KSM's torture -- or
any other -- actually saved a single life.

As far as we know, none of the alleged plots
that were allegedly disrupted was anything more
than a fantasy. There is no evidence they
presented an actual danger. There is not a single
saved life they can point to. If they could, they
would have.

The first time Bush disclosed what he alleged
were thwarted terror plots was in a speech in
October 2005. "Overall, the United States and
our partners have disrupted at least ten serious
al Qaeda terrorist plots since September the 11th,
including three al Qaeda plots to attack inside the
United States," he said. The White House then
distributed what it called a fact sheet.

But a few days later, the Washington Post
reported:

Intelligence officials who spoke on the condition
of anonymity said the White House overstated
the gravity of the plots by saying that they had
been foiled, when most were far from ready
to be executed....

The president made it 'sound like well-hatched
plans,' said a former CIA official involved
in counterterrorism during that period. 'I don't
think they fall into that category.'

Similarly, in a February 2006 speech Bush
offered more details about that alleged Library
Tower plot. The Director of National Intelligence
obligingly declassified a Summary of the High
Value Terrorist Detainee Program to go along
with that. But the Washington Post soon
reported that "several U.S. intelligence officials
played down the relative importance of the
alleged plot and attributed the timing of Bush's
speech to politics."

And even when the CIA last year released
documents that Cheney had sworn would
definitively prove that torture had "prevented
the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds
of thousands, of innocent people," those
documents turned out to include no such
proof -- just a lot more cover-your-ass
language from the CIA.
Senator Rockefeller concluded in March 2008:

As Chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, I have heard nothing to suggest
that information obtained from enhanced
interrogation techniques has prevented an
imminent terrorist attack. And I have heard
nothing that makes me think the information
obtained from these techniques could not have
been obtained through traditional interrogation
methods used by military and law enforcement
interrogators. On the other hand, I do know
that coercive interrogations can lead detainees
to provide false information in order to make
the interrogation stop.

Bush's assertion that torture thwarted plots
to attack Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf
got some renewed attention earlier this month
after portions of his memoir were serialized in
theTimes of London. The journalists across
the pond, at least, pushed back a bit.

The Guardian reported:

British officials said today there was no
evidence to support claims by George Bush,
the former US president, that information
extracted by "waterboarding" saved British
lives by foiling attacks on Heathrow airport
and Canary Wharf....

British counter-terrorism officials distanced
themselves from Bush's claims. They said
Mohammed provided "extremely valuable"
information which was passed on to security
and intelligence agencies, but that it mainly
related to al-Qaida's structure and was not
known to have been extracted through torture.

The Daily Mail reported:

Lord MacDonald, the former Director of Public
Prosecutions, said: 'These stories about
waterboarding thwarting attacks on Canary
Wharf and Heathrow -- I've never seen anything
to substantiate these claims. These claims are
to be treated with a great deal of skepticism.'

Now it's true that some British intelligence
officials -- notoriously close to their American
colleagues -- share Bush's views. The head
of Britain's MI5, for instance, actually defended
the use of torture on familiar grounds last year:

Al Qaeda had indeed made plans for further
attacks after 9/11: details of some of these
plans came to light through the interrogation
of detainees by other countries, including
the US, in the period after 9/11; subsequent
investigation on the ground, including in the
UK, substantiated these claims. Such
intelligence was of the utmost importance to
the safety and security of the UK. It has
saved British lives. Many attacks have been
stopped as a result of effective international
intelligence co-operation since 9/11.

But he offered no verifiable details, of course.

Meanwhile, the new British Prime Minister,
conservative David Cameron, told the
Telegraph that torture was wrong and that Bush
administration detainee policy had done harm,
rather than good.

"Look, I think torture is wrong and I think
we ought to be very clear about that,"
Mr Cameron said. "And I think we should
also be clear that if actually you're getting
information from torture, it's very likely to
be unreliable information."

When pressed on whether torture saves lives,
he added: "I think there is both a moral reason
for being opposed to torture -- and Britain
doesn't sanction torture -- but secondly I think
there's also an effectiveness thing ... if you
look at the effect of Guantánamo Bay and
other things like that, long-term that has
actually helped to radicalise people and make
our country and our world less safe. So I don't
agree."

There may be little point in speculating on
what drove Cheney and Bush to cross such
a clear and important ethical line. Was it that
they were well and truly terrified? Did they
succumb to the lures of the ticking time
bomb-fallacy so popular on TV -- and among
the supremely confident? Some social
psychologists have speculated that the real
motivation for torture is retribution.

It was the Senate Armed Services Committee,
in April 2009, that actually suggested an even
more nefarious possible motive: That the
White House started pushing the use of torture
not out of concern about an imminent threat,
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 invasion.

That becomes less incredible when you
consider that it was a false confession
extracted under torture by Egyptian authorities
from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a terror suspect who
had been rendered to Egypt by the CIA, that
was the sole source for arguments Bush made
in a key pre-Iraq war speech in October 2002.

"We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda
members in bomb-making and poisons and
deadly gases," Bush said at the time -- with
no caveats. The same false confession
provided a critical part of then-secretary of
state Colin Powell's famous presentation to
the United Nations, a month before the
invasion.

Finally, it's hugely important to remember
that Bush's embrace of torture went far beyond
the waterboard. For Bush, the best-case
scenario is that the debate remains about his
approval of the use of that one procedure on
three top terror suspects.

But Bush's legacy is one of much more
wanton and widespread cruelty -- a cruelty
that was truly unimaginable before the unique
combination of 9/11 and some particularly
cold-blooded people occupying high office.

Bush and his helpers approved a wide range
of other brutal interrogation practices, including
severe beatings, painful stress positions, severe
sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme cold
and hot temperatures, forced nudity, threats,
hooding, the use of dogs and sensory
deprivation -- many of which, it turned out,
were cribbed from techniques Chinese
Communists perfected to extract confessions
from captured U.S. servicemen.

Some of these tactics fall short of the legal
definition of torture, some don't, but they
are all, as former Navy general counsel
Alberto Mora explained in 2008, morally
indefensible:

Many Americans are unaware that there is
a legal distinction between cruelty and torture,
cruelty being the less severe level of abuse.
This has tended to obscure important elements
of the interrogation debate from the public's
attention. For example, the public may be
largely unaware that the government could
evasively if truthfully claim (and did claim)
that it was not "torturing" even as it was
simultaneously interrogating detainees cruelly.
Yet there is little or no moral distinction between
cruelty and torture, for cruelty can be as effective
as torture in savaging human flesh and spirit and
in violating human dignity. Our efforts should be
focused not merely on banning torture, but
on banning cruelty.

Tactics that violated basic human dignity
were not limited to three men, or even to the
three dozen men subjected to "enhanced
interrogation" at the CIA's black sites in Poland,
Thailand, and Romania. They were employed
as a matter of standard practice on countless
detainees held in custody in Afghanistan, Iraq
and Guantanamo Bay.

And once cruelty was adopted as a weapon
of war, that inevitably opened the door wide
to abusive and degrading practices that
weren't explicitly authorized.

Far from being limited to ostensibly "high value"
detainees, state-sanctioned cruelty was applied
willy-nilly to many of those unfortunate enough
to get swept up into the system. We literally
have no idea how many.

As a bipartisan Senate report in 2008 concluded:

The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late
2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers
acting on their own. Interrogation techniques
such as stripping detainees of their clothes,
placing them in stress positions, and using
military working dogs to intimidate them
appeared in Iraq only after they had been
approved for use in Afghanistan and
at [Guantanamo]. Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002, authorization
of aggressive interrogation techniques and
subsequent interrogation policies and plans
approved by senior military and civilian officials
conveyed the message that physical pressures
and degradation were appropriate treatment
for detainees in U.S. military custody. What
followed was an erosion in standards dictating
that detainees be treated humanely.

The report laid out a clear line of responsibility
for Abu Ghraib that started with Bush and his
February 2002 memo exempting war-on-terror
detainees from the Geneva Conventions.

Mora, one of the few voices of conscience
inside the government during that dark period,
summed up the damage this way:

[O]ur Nation's policy decision to use so-called
"harsh" interrogation techniques during the
War on Terror was a mistake of massive
proportions. It damaged and continues
to damage our Nation in ways that appear
never to have been considered or imagined by
its architects and supporters, whose policy
focus seems to have been narrowly confined
to the four corners of the interrogation room.
This interrogation policy -- which may aptly
be labeled a "policy of cruelty" -- violated our
founding values, our constitutional system and
the fabric of our laws, our over-arching foreign
policy interests, and our national security. The
net effect of this policy of cruelty has been to
weaken our defenses, not to strengthen them,
and has been greatly contrary to our national
interest.

George W. Bush has managed to duck the
ignominy he deserves for launching this policy
of cruelty. He has done so in part by framing
the debate as one solely about waterboarding
-- and counting on a lazy, amnesiac press
corps to neither confront him on that count
nor call him out for the wider moral breach for
which he is responsible.

Back in 2004, as soon as the photos of detainee
abuse at Abu Ghraib went public, Bush and his
collaborators launched a high-stakes
disinformation campaign to prevent the American
people from linking the White House to the
pervasive, inhumane treatment of detainees --
many of whom were utterly innocent -- at prison
facilities such as Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and
Guantanamo. Being associated with the
waterboarding of three top terrorists was at least
a defensible position. Being responsible for
wide scale violations of the laws of war was
not.

That disinformation campaign continues today,
in "Decision Points." If we forget what really
happened, it just might succeed.

"Bill Schenley" wrote in message
...
The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies
Of George W. Bush's Memoir

FROM: The Huffington Post ~
By Dan Froomkin

WASHINGTON

These days, when we think of George W. Bush,
we think mostly of what a horrible mess he made
of the economy. But his even more tragic legacy
is the loss of our moral authority, and the
transformation of the United States of America
from global champion of human rights into
an outlaw nation.

Did more damage than anyone in history.