As our dual narrative America continues in opposite directions over torture…of all things……it becomes more and more important to stop and take the time to expose the lies still being touted about torture.
When George W. Bush said repeatedly, "America doesn't torture", he was relying on his own narrative about torture as defined by his Office of Legal Counsel attorneys who had "legalized" torture.
I can say, "The Reverend doesn't steal", and yet still be hitting up liquor stores, head held high, if I keep telling myself robbing liquor stores isn't really stealing. I could even have an attorney write me up some memoes using tons of legalese, arguing that robbing liquor stores, if done a certain way, is not a violation of law.
If challenged that robbing liquor stores is illegal, I could point to my "legal" justifications and petulantly insist I did nothing wrong.
So, saying, "America doesn't torture", is just a word game.
But the claim, being recirculated by the same neo-con nuts who started it in the first place, that torturing detainee Abu Zubaida resulted in the saving of American lives and the breakup of other terror plots is not just a word game…….it is totally false.
Unfortunately, this false narrative will live on,….it will live on as a zombie narrative. It will be added to the zombie pile of dead and rotted narratives that still walk amongst us as zombie neo-con memes. Dead and proven to be phony, false…..but still stumbling around in the land of the living.
There's no longer any question about whether the crazed neo-cons tortured…..they did, and now, with the Bush torture-memo revelations, it's fully out in the open that the Bush White House authorized that torture.
So the zombie narrative, the new living dead claim, has moved to the "effectiveness" of the torturing which Bush had "legalized" and, then, implemented.
About the torturing of Abu Zubaida, here's what the Washington Post reported recently….
As weeks passed after the (Zubaida) capture without significant new confessions, the Bush White House and some at the CIA became convinced that tougher measures had to be tried.
The pressure from upper levels of the government was "tremendous," driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates, one official remembered.
"They couldn't stand the idea that there wasn't anything new," the official said. "They'd say, 'You aren't working hard enough.' There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution — a feeling that 'He's going to talk, and if he doesn't talk, we'll do whatever.' "
So they tortured Zubaida…..and here's what happened…..
The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.
The interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla, the man Abu Zubaida identified as heading an effort to explode a radiological "dirty bomb" in an American city. Padilla was held in a naval brig for 3 1/2 years on the allegation but was never charged in any such plot. Every other lead ultimately dissolved into smoke and shadow, according to high-ranking former U.S. officials with access to classified reports.
"We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms," one former intelligence official said.
In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
Here is the final evidence that torturing Zubaida didn't prevent or breakup any terror plot…..
Since 2006, Senate intelligence committee members have pressed the CIA, in classified briefings, to provide examples of specific leads that were obtained from Abu Zubaida through the use of waterboarding and other methods, according to officials familiar with the requests.
The agency provided none, the officials said.
No matter what the Bush-clones, Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey, have been screeching like mono-syllable-spouting zombies the last couple of days in the Wall Street Journal and on corporate teevee…..it ain't true.
Torture produces worthless information….that's what the Zubaida story demonstrates. What the Zubaida story does not demonstrate, at all, is that torturing him saved American lives by breaking up future terror plots.
That's just a lie.
