For a Bush administration desperate for a justification to invade oil-rich Iraq, this made torture a political necessity. According to a recent Vanity Fair article, Zubaydah claimed under torture that bin Laden was collaborating with Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish regions in northern Iraq. This claim became a commonplace of apologists for the Iraq war, appearing notably in the columns of pro-war New York Times columnist William Safire.
This use of torture was part of a broader pattern, arising from the US ruling class' response to the September 11 attacks. It ruled out any serious investigation of the attacks—including the suspicious blocking of FBI investigations of the hijackers by high-level officials prior to the attacks, and the close business links between the bin Ladens and high-ranking US political figures such as then-President George W. Bush. Instead, it seized upon the attacks as a pretext to carpet-bomb and occupy Afghanistan.
The hysterical atmosphere whipped up by the US press and government to justify this aggression against Afghanistan created the context both for US war crimes in Afghanistan—such as the massacre of Taliban prisoners of war at the Qala-i-Janghi fortress and, under US supervision, by the troops of Afghan warlord Rashid Dostum—and for the use of torture. In February 2002, President Bush announced that the US would no longer comply with the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. Detainees captured by the US in Afghanistan were transported to a prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, where they were tortured and denied access to US courts.
The Bush administration made full use of the lies it had extracted through torture. Besides Zubaydah's linking of Al Qaeda to Iraq, both he and Binyam Mohamed stated under torture that US citizen José Padilla was planning a "dirty bomb" attack on US cities.
The US government later dropped this claim, in a tacit admission that it was false, but it had already served its purpose. The Bush administration waited a month after capturing Padilla to announce his alleged "dirty bomb" plot to the public, then used it to drown out a mounting controversy four days after FBI agent Coleen Rowley revealed that her investigations of 9/11 hijackers had been squelched by FBI superiors.
The invasion of Iraq, justified to the American public through the use of torture, encouraged Washington to expand the use of torture against the Iraqi people so as to obtain information on the Iraqi resistance. Guantánamo Bay prison commander General Geoffrey Miller was sent to Iraq to "Gitmoize" Iraq—i.e., to transfer the interrogation methods of Guantánamo Bay to Iraqi prisons. The result was the Abu Ghraib scandal, as pictures surfaced in 2004 showing large-scale US torture of Iraqi prisoners.
The close link between torture and US wars of aggression again confirms the contention of the International Military Tribunal set up to prosecute the Nazi leadership at Nuremburg: "To initiate a war of aggression... is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
The World Socialist Web Site places no confidence in the Democratic Party or the Obama administration to investigate the use of torture by the Bush administration. Even if it is not shut down, any investigation led by such forces will be deeply compromised by political considerations, such as the Democratic Party’s complicity in Bush’s torture program and the need to justify Obama’s continuation of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A true accounting can come only from a political movement of the working class which holds the entire political establishment responsible for the crimes committed by the Bush administration.
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