American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [110]
I was waterboarded during my navy training at SERE (Survival, Escape, Resistance and Evasion) School, to know what it’s like in case we ever became POWs, and it is a method of torture. Cheney’s word for it is “enhanced interrogation.” Well, you give me Dick Cheney and a waterboard for an hour, and I’ll have him confessing to the Sharon Tate murders. Not too long ago, the ACLU managed to pry loose government documents including a CIA manual about what they call “extraordinary rendition.” It describes the “capture shock” that happened before a detainee got put on the flight to some overseas prison. Little techniques like being shackled, and bound up in blindfolds and hoods so you couldn’t see or hear. After which you’d get stripped down and shaved and have your picture taken. Not to mention “walling,” defined as slamming somebody’s head against the wall but with certain “protective measures” so they don’t die.2 You get the picture.
We all remember the gruesome images of Abu Ghraib, but the CIA admits having destroyed hundreds of hours of “coercive interrogation” videotapes that took place in secret prisons.3 Don’t you find it pretty sadistic that they’d even want to make movies of all this? These are measures I’ve always associated with the KGB or the Nazis. Come to find out from a Senate Armed Services Committee report on prisoner abuse that they even created an experimental “battle lab” for the torture program at Guantánamo, in a throwback to MK-ULTRA.4
What galls me more than anything is how they used torture in pursuit of lies to justify their actions. First of all, Bush and Cheney pressured lawyers at the Department of Justice to produce memos authorizing them do whatever they wanted and call it legal.5 Then, in the weeks just before we invaded Iraq and the first couple months of our occupation, there turned out to be major spikes in the harshest torture techniques. It was all part of an attempt to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. Major Paul Burney, who was part of the Guantánamo interrogation team, told investigators: “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link, there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”6
After Ibn Al-Shaykh Al-Libi was captured, the CIA “rendered” him to Egypt (the term reminds me of what we do to slabs of beef). There he was tortured into making a false confession that Saddam had gotten information about use of chemical and biological weapons from a couple of al-Qaeda operatives. Al-Libi was a supposed suicide in a Libyan jail in May 2009.7 Speaking of al-Qaeda, I recently came across this point: “Should the members of the 9/11 Presidential Commission not have been informed that two of the ‘key witnesses’ upon whom their report was based had provided the information to the report’s conclusions only after being waterboarded a total of 266 times?”8
How low would these guys stoop? We’ve learned since Bush left office of a meeting he had with Tony Blair to talk about how the United Nations inspectors weren’t going to find any Weapons of Mass Destruction, but why not go ahead anyway? A memo written early in 2003 has Bush telling Blair of a U.S. plan “to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in U.N. colors over Iraq with fighter cover.” If Saddam fired at them, he’d be in violation of the U.N. resolutions and that would be ample justification to invade.9 Sounds like a transplant of Operation Northwoods to me.
We may never know how many detainees died in our custody in secret prisons. We do have fresh evidence, though, of an “executive assassination ring” that was revealed by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in March 2009.