Two Dangerous Bush-Cheney Myths
http://www.truthout.org/122908R
As George W. Bush and Dick Cheney make their case for some positive
legacy from the past eight years, two arguments are playing key
roles:
the notion that torturing terror suspects saved American lives and
the
belief that Bush's Iraq troop "surge" transformed a disaster into
something close to "victory."
Not only will these twin arguments be important in defining the
public's future impression of where Bush should rank on the
presidential list, but they could constrain how far President Barack
Obama can go in reversing these policies. In other words, the
perception of the past can affect the future.
Though most current thinking holds that George W. Bush might want
to trademark the slogan "Worst President Ever," America's powerful
right-wing media (and its many allies in the mainstream press) will
surely seek to rehabilitate Bush's reputation as much as possible.
Even elevating Bush to the status of a presidential mediocrity
might open the door for a revival of the Bush Dynasty with brother
Jeb
already eyeing one of Florida's U.S. Senate seats and possibly
harboring grander ambitions.
And even if another Bush in the White House is not realistic, a
kinder-gentler judgment on George W. Bush at least could help the
Republican Party rebound in 2010 and 2012. So evaluating the Bush-
Cheney torture policies and how successful the "surge" are not just
academic exercises.
Two recent articles by people with first-hand knowledge also shed
important new light on these issues: one by a lead U.S. interrogator
in Iraq and the other by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The interrogator - using the pseudonym "Matthew Alexander" for an
article in the Washington Post's Outlook section on Nov. 30 - wrote
that the practice of humiliating and abusing prisoners had proved
counterproductive, not only violating U.S. principles and failing to
extract reliable intelligence but fueling the Iraqi insurgency and
getting large numbers of U.S. soldiers killed.
Indeed, "Alexander," a U.S. Air Force special operations officer,
argued that it was his team's abandonment of those harsh tactics that
contributed to the tracking down and killing of the murderous al-
Qaeda
in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006, an important
turning
point in reducing levels of violence in Iraq.
"Alexander" said he arrived in Iraq in March 2006, amid the
bloody
civil war that Sunni extremist Zarqawi had helped provoke a month
earlier with the bombing of the golden-domed Askariya mosque in
Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq's majority Shiites.
"Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and
I
joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi,"
he wrote. "What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me.
The
Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo
Bay model. ... These interrogations were based on fear and control;
they often resulted in torture and abuse.
"I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I
extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned
to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one
based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural
understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out
information."
Breakthroughs
By getting to know the captives and negotiating with them, his
team achieved breakthroughs that enabled the U.S. military to close
in
on Zarqawi while also gaining a deeper understanding of what drove
the
Iraqi insurgency, "Alexander" wrote.
"Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics,
our
attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the
stereotypical
al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw
them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from
Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would
still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq.
"Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq
as
much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to
provide them with arms and money," the interrogator wrote, noting
that
this understanding played a key role in the U.S. military turning
many
Sunnis against the hyper-violent extremism of Zarqawi's organization.
"Alexander" added that the new interrogation methods "convinced
one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's
location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs
on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders."
Despite the success in killing Zarqawi, "Alexander" said the old,
harsh interrogation methods continued. "I came home from Iraq feeling
as if my mission was far from accomplished," he wrote. "Soon after my
return, the public learned that another part of our government, the
CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out
of detainees."
"Alexander" found that the engrained support for using "rough
stuff" against hardened jihadists was difficult to overcome despite
the successes from more subtle approaches.
"We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters,
by
using our new techniques," he wrote. "A few of them never abandoned
the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One
actually told me, 'I thought you would torture me, and when you
didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was
wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate.'"
From hundreds of these interrogations, "Alexander" said he
learned
that the images from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib were actually
getting American soldiers killed by drawing angry young Arabs into
the
Iraq War.
"Torture and abuse cost American lives," the interrogator wrote.
"I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked
there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting
fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings
in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also
involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq.
"It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and
casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who
joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number
of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will
never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close
to
the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.
"How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond
me
-- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans."
Nevertheless, in a series of candid "exit interviews," Vice
President Cheney - and to a lesser degree President Bush - have
defended their actions that included sanctioning brutal methods of
interrogation, such as the simulated drowning of
"waterboarding." [See
Consortiumnews.com's "Cheney Defends Waterboarding Order."]
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