Judge Kessler's findings point to yet another even more alarming aspect of the Bush-era crimes for which Rumsfeld is now being pursued for his part. And that is the emerging evidence that the tortures perpetrated were not designed to protect national security at all, but to obtain false confessions in order to score propaganda points for the War on terror.
Andy Worthington writes that:
"As it happens, one of the confessions that was tortured out of Binyam is so ludicrous that it was soon dropped...The US authorities insisted that Padilla and Binyam had dinner with various high-up members of al-Qaeda the night before Padilla was to fly off to America. According to their theory the dinner party had to have been on the evening of 3 April in Karachi ... Binyam was meant to have dined with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Sheikh al-Libi, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Jose Padilla." What made the scenario "absurd," as [Binyam's lawyer] pointed out, was that "two of the conspirators were already in U.S. custody at the time -- Abu Zubaydah was seized six days before, on 28 March 2002, and al-Libi had been held since November 2001.""
The charges against Binyam were dropped, after the prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld, resigned. He told the BBC later that he had concerns at the repeated suppression of evidence that could prove prisoners' innocence.
The litany of tortures alleged against Rumsfeld in the military prisons he ran could go on for some time. The new photographic images from Abu Ghraib make it hard to conceive of how the methods of torture and dehumanization could have possibly served a national purpose.
The approved use of attack dogs, sexual humiliation, forced masturbation, and treatments which plumb the depths of human depravity are either documented in Rumsfeld's own memos, or credibly reported on.
"The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation - match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.
One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing.""
Torture Now Aimed at Americans, Programs Designed to Obtain False Confessions, Not Intelligence
The worst of the worst is that Rumsfeld's logic strikes directly at the foundations of our democracy and the legitimacy of the War on Terror. The torture methods studied and adopted by the Bush administration were not new, but adopted from the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program (SERE) which is taught to elite military units. The program was developed during the Cold War, in response to North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet Bloc torture methods. But the aim of those methods was never to obtain intelligence, but to elicit false confessions. The Bush administration asked the military to "reverse engineer" the methods, i.e. figure out how to break down resistance to false confessions.
In the 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report which indicted high-level Bush administration officials, including Rumsfeld, as bearing major responsibility for the torture at Abu Gharib, Guantanamo, and Bagram, the Committee said:
"SERE instructors explained "Biderman's Principles" -- which were based on coercive methods used by the Chinese Communist dictatorship to elicit false confessions from U.S. POWs during the Korean War -- and left with GTMO personnel a chart of those coercive techniques."
The Biderman Principles were based on the work of Air Force
Psychiatrist Albert Biderman, who wrote the landmark "Communist
Attempts to Elecit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War,"
on which SERE resistance was based. Biderman wrote:
"The experiences of American Air Force prisoners of war in Korea who were pressured for false confessions, enabled us to compile an outline of methods of eliciting compliance, not much different, it turned out, from those reported by persons held by Communists of other nations. I have prepared a chart showing a condensed version of this outline."
The chart is a how-to for communist torturers interested only in false confessions for propaganda purposes, not intelligence. It was the manual for, in Biderman's words, "brainwashing." In the reference for Principle Number 7, "Degradation," the chart explains:
"Makes Costs of Resistance Appear More Damaging to Self-Esteem than Capitulation; Reduces Prisoner to "Animal Level...Personal Hygiene Prevented; Filthy, Infested Surroundings; Demeaning Punishments; Insults and Taunts; Denial of Privacy"
Appallingly, this could explain that even photos such as those of feces-smeared prisoners at Abu Ghraib might not, as we would hope, be only the individual work of particularly demented guards, but part of systematic degradation authorized at the highest levels.
Exhibit: Abu Ghraib, Female POW
This could go far toward explaining why the Bush administration seemed so tone-deaf to intelligence professionals, including legendary CIA Director William Colby, who essentially told them they were doing it all wrong. A startling level of consensus existed within the intelligence community that the way to produce good intelligence was to gain the trust of prisoners and to prove everything they had been told by their recruiters, about the cruelty and degeneracy of America, to be wrong.
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