Right Wing Tortured Logic

One would think that conservatives and neo-conservatives hold sacred our country’s founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence. Penned by Thomas Jefferson, the second paragraph of the Declaration provides probably the most memorized passage of that document:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This is the sentence that separates America from all other countries. Our founders asserted that each and every person had basic rights that could not be repudiated or transferred to another. In other words, the importance of the individual supersedes that of the community. It is this concept that lies at the heart of our nation’s traditional abhorrence of torture.

George Washington, although the head of a rebel Army and accused of treason, early on set a high standard for how enemy prisoners should be treated. The writing and acceptance of the Geneva Convention were made by people who knew first-hand the burdens, horrors and confusion of war. It was in the aftermath of the slaughter of almost 60 million people in World War II, including the Nazi effort to exterminate more than six million Jews as well as homosexuals and gypsies. The conventions prohibiting torture were written with the full knowledge of the violence and carnage crazed fanatics could inflict.

Yet George Bush and his Strangelovian Vice President, Dick Cheney stridently insisted pushing their ahistorical nonsensical view that the “war on terror” was without antecedent. I suppose we should not be surprised by this. Since each man found a way to shirk any combat experience in Vietnam one can easily understand why they were completely clueless of the fact that the Viet Cong, many years before there was an Al Qaeda, disguised themselves as civilians, organized into cells without a traditional military hierarchy and carried out terrorist attacks against U.S. soldiers, diplomats and civilians. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon asserted the right to torture the Viet Cong.

Today’s Washington Post offers an important illustration of the stupidity of the Bush Administration’s use of torture on Al Qaeda suspects. Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots by Peter Finn and Toby Warwick details the evil our country inflicted on a suspected terrorist. According to Finn and Warwick,

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

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.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations,” and other top officials called him a “trusted associate” of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Now here comes the right wing’s tortured logic. A former Bush speechwriter, Bruce Theissen, has a screed up at National Review’s The Corner were he stomps his metaphorical feet and rants:

The Left’s assault on the CIA program continues with today’s front-page story about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah: “Detainees Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots.” The story, like so many on this program, is rife with errors and misinformation.

For example, the Post states:

“Abu Zubaida quickly told U.S. interrogators of [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed and of others he knew to be in al-Qaeda, and he revealed the plans of the low-level operatives who fled Afghanistan with him. Some were intent on returning to target American forces with bombs; others wanted to strike on American soil again, according to military documents and law enforcement sources. Such intelligence was significant but not blockbuster material. Frustrated, the Bush administration ratcheted up the pressure — for the first time approving the use of increasingly harsh interrogations, including waterboarding.”

This is either uninformed or intentionally misleading.

In fact, what Abu Zubaydah disclosed to the CIA during this period was that the fact that KSM was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and that his code name was “Muktar” – something Zubaydah thought we already knew, but in fact we did not. Intelligence officials had been trying for months to figure out who “Muktar” was. This information provided by Zubaydah was a critical piece of the puzzle that allowed them to pursue and eventually capture KSM. This fact, in and of itself, discredits the premise of the Post story – to suggest that the capture of KSM was not information that “foiled plots” to attack America is absurd on the face of it.

I do not know if it is willful ignorance on the part of Thiessen or just flat out ignorance. Regardless, he is ignoring some critical facts. The FBI elicited the information about Padilla from Zubaydah aka Zubayda without torture. He gave it up while conversing with FBI personnel, who did not and refused to engage in torture of any kind. And when it comes to the so-called golden nugget about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9-11 Commission noted in its report that the CIA had the information in their files before 9-11 identifying the true identify of Muktar.

Zubayda’s case, unfortunately is not unique. Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side, is the best unofficial indictment of the Bush Administration as war criminals that exists. She extensively documents her work and lays out the litany of abuses and crimes in such a way that no fair minded person, regardless of political allegiance, can ignore. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney led an effort that deprived individuals, including at least two American citizens, of life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. The Washington Post piece is not a “whitewash.” To the contrary, it is a belated effort to start setting straight the public record of the crimes the American people willfully ignored because we let our fear of terror smother the guiding principles of our nation’s heritage.