It is important to remember the context in which American soldiers were turned into brutal sadists. If you cry for the victims of torture in Iraq, cry for the soldiers too.

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Tomorrow is a national day of action calling for a special prosecutor for those who ordered illegal torture. There is something people are missing here about the TortureGate photos: If releasing the torture photos will endanger national security, that proves the Bush-Cheney administration put us in greater danger.  If we are to accept Obama's argument that those photos are dangerous, then what about the people who ordered it?  How do we deal with those who, as General Anthony Taguba says, were responsible for

"[a] permissive environment created by implicit and explicit authorizations by senior US officials to "take the gloves off"..."

It is important to remember the context in which American soldiers were turned into brutal sadists.  The above image, taken in Iraq, is just one example of how soldiers were taught to link the attacks on 9/11 with Iraqis and the Iraq War. It cannot be counted how many times Bush or Cheney went on national TV to make the firm connection for those who rushed to serve after the attacks, with statements like:

"After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got." -- In Bush's January 20, 2004, State of the Union address

"We're taking the fight to those that attacked us." --
February 24, 2006, American Legion in Washington, D.C.

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. They're equally as bad. They work in concert,"

Nagem Sadoon Hatab, a 52-year-old Iraqi, was killed in U.S. custody at a Marine camp close to Nasiriyah, Iraq.  After his arrival in June 2003, a number of Marines beat Hatab, including allegedly "karate-kicking" him while he stood handcuffed and hooded.  A day later, Hatab reportedly developed severe diarrhea, and was covered in feces.  Hatab was stripped and examined by a medic, who thought that Hatab might be faking sickness.

Hatab was later dragged outside to make way for another prisoner, covered in his own feces, and left in the sun. He was found dead sometime after midnight.

A U.S. Army medical examiner's autopsy of Hatab found that he had died of strangulation.  The autopsy also found that six of Hatab's ribs were broken and his back, buttocks, legs and knees covered with bruises.  Hatab's hyoid bone, a U-shaped throat bone located at the base of the tongue, was never found.  The bone was a key piece of evidence, because it supported the Army Medical Examiner's finding that Hatab died of strangulation.  Two Marine guards were court martialed, but never served prison time.

Anyone will tell you that at or near the main gate of every military base in Iraq is an image of the Twin Towers.  WMD or no WMD, it was the link in the minds of soldiers who didn't probe too deeply or spend their Sunday mornings watching rebuttals on Meet the Press, which brought out the savagery of human nature when payback is in mind.  I would assert that in the absence of such direct links, even couched the way they were in ambiguity enough to allow for lawyerly defenses later (never having to reach nearly as far as "depends on what you mean by the word "is""), most of these young men could have as much done such things in their normal state as hurt a fly.

The key pieces of evidence cited by Bush in public were:

-- "Zarqawi was in Iraq, proving an Iraq - Al Qaeda connection."  But Zarqawi was in an area controlled by the Kurds.  But the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that Iraq "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates."  The truth is bin Laden and Saddam hated each other, as Saddam was secular and allowed women to become doctors, and bin Laden considered him an infidel for being an ally of the US for so long.

-- "Atta met with Iraqi Intelligence in Prague, proving the Iraq - Al Qaeda connection."     Cited by Dick Cheney.  But Atta was in a bank ATM in Florida.  The FBI has the security camera photos to prove it.

Colin Powell mentioned Zarqawi no fewer than twenty times in his UN speech, and said Iraq "today harbors a deadly terrorist network" headed by Zarqawi.

The most damning evidence of Bush's duplicity was mentioned briefly during the 2004 presidential debates, then dropped like a hot potato by the media.  This was the overwhelming testimony of soldiers that Bush had bin Laden in his sights at Tora Bora.   If bin Laden were captured or killed, the momentum for Iraq would evaporate.  It emerged briefly on 60 Minutes, a scoop of the century, then never mentioned once on the nightly news headlines.

The top CIA commander in Afghanistan in December of 2001, Gary Berntsen, urgently requested 800 U.S. troops to block bin Laden's escape.  The request was denied.  CIA Deputy Counter Terrorism Director Hank Crumpton  asked General Tommy Franks to  send in reinforcements from the 1200 Marines who were stationed 80 miles away, in Kandahar, but that request was also denied.   Osama bin Laden finally bribed the Northern Alliance warlords charged with blocking his escape, whom Berntsen had begged his superiors not to trust.  

Both George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney later repeated General Franks' claim that the U.S was not sure bin Laden was trapped at Tora Bora.  Both Bush and Cheney said in interviews: "We don't know if bin Laden was at Tora Bora."  But Berntsen's contradiction is blunt.   "I knew exactly where he was" he told MSNBC in 2005.  He told Newsweek:  "He was there."  CIA field commander Gary Schroen, who was pulled out of retirement by the Bush administration to lay the groundwork for the assault on the Taliban 2 days after 9/11, is equally blunt in his concurrence with Berntsen, saying: "I have no doubt that he [bin Laden] was there [in Tora Bora]."

Al Qaeda was left to regenerate.  Along with an Afghanistan reconstruction which was drowned in the bathtub, it resulted in the second wave of Al Qaeda resurgence we are seeing now.

What's next for the Bush-Era Accountability Movement, including TortureGate?  The consensus seems to be for a special prosecutor.  Investigative commissions and panels are too often used by the likes of John Conyers to generate a press release and then bury the issue for 2 months, rinse repeat until the session is over.  But a prosecutor to prosecute whom?  The instigators, that's who.  In addition to John Yoo and the Torture Gurus, those who helped falsify intelligence and lied us into the war.  Some will disagree, and say there is no excuse for following illegal orders, but "following orders" is too simple. If you cry for the victims of torture in Iraq, cry for the soldiers too.  A man told me in a bar, after a bout of arguing politics and drinking, nearly in tears, "I'm ashamed of what I did in Iraq."  

Those who knew better, and lied deliberately and in cold blood, over and over, deserve no such sympathy.  

Rabbi Yitzchok Dov Koppelman wrote:

"one who causes another to sin is worse than one who murders another person...Of a murderer it is written, "The congregation shall judge him and save him."

Those who know full well what they were doing, and stated it clearly and concisely as far back as their membership in the Project for a New American Century, must be the targets.  This is no invisible and mysterious cabal we are helpless to oppose.  This is a small number of men (and women) like Douglas Feith, who ran a rogue intelligence operation to feed misinformation like Curveball's, a certifiable nut according to German intelligence who nevertheless was used in Colin Powell's speech to the UN, men like Dick Cheney, who while in the command bunker clearly issued the order to not shoot down the second incoming airliner, which was sure to hit.  It's time for the movement to start naming all the names, over and over, so that citizens can understand these are real live people who can be touched by the law.  

Implicate all of congress?  Because they were looking at the same intelligence?  No, they weren't. The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate presented to congress before the war, the administration's key document, was scrubbed of the conclusion by 16 US intelligence agencies that Saddam was NOT an imminent threat, and would attack or pass on WMD to a terrorists organization only if attacked first.  Big, big time deception well-documented in Vincent Bugliosi's book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder."

On this day before nationwide rallies for the appointment of a special prosecutor, the suspected war criminals are:

1 Abrams, Elliot
2 Addington, David
3 Ashcroft, John
4 Bellinger III, John B.
5 Bolton, John R.
6 Bremer, Paul
7 Bush, George W
8 Bybee, Jay S.
9 Card Jr., Andrew H.
10 Cheney, Richard
11 Chertoff, Michael B.
12 Feith, Douglas
13 Franks, General Tommy Ray
14 Gates, Robert M.
15 Gonzales, Alberto R.
16 Hadley, Stephen John
17 Hayden, Michael V.
18 Haynes, William J
19 Libby, I. Lewis "Scooter"
20 Negroponte, John Dimitri
21 Pelosi, Nancy
22 Perle, Richard Norman
23 Petraeus, David H.
24 Powell, Colin Luther
25 Prince, Erik. D
26 Rice, Condoleeza
27 Rove, Karl Christian
28 Rumsfeld, Donald H.
29 Tenet, George John
30 Wolfowitz, Paul Dundes
31 Yoo, John Choon

From now through Thursday please call Attorney General Eric Holder at 202-353-1555 to demand a Special Prosecutor. Then call your own congressmember at 202-224-3121. Please circulate and forward this post to your congressmember and to the White House. LINK TO CONGRESS EMAILS. LINK TO EMAIL WHITE HOUSE.

Authors Website: https://ralphlopez.wordpress.com/

Authors Bio:

Ralph Lopez majored in Economics and Political Science at Yale University. He writes for Truth Out, Alternet, Consortium News, Op-Ed News, and other Internet media. He reported from Afghanistan in 2009 and produced a short documentary film on the situation. He has also been published in the Boston Globe and the Baltimore Sun.

Website: https://ralphlopez.wordpress.com/