from Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters :
If, as the experts say, torture does not yield timely and accurate information, then why has the U.S. government been torturing so many people?
U.S. Senator Carl Levin offers the most plausible answer: “The (CIA’s torture) techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes...the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain.” According to a Senate report on detainee abuse, "Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other former senior Bush administration officials were responsible for the abusive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan" and that the torture policy's original purpose was to produce false confessions linking Iraq to 9/11.
And speaking of false confessions, the London Times points out: "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times in one month, and 'confessed' to murdering the journalist Daniel Pearl, which he did not. There could hardly be more compelling evidence that such techniques are neither swift, nor efficient, nor reliable." The kind of intensive long term torture inflicted on KSM is normally intended not for extracting timely information, but for destroying the victim's personality, including his or her accurate and truthful memories, so that a new, programmable personality can be constructed.
The 9/11 Commission's account of the 19-Muslims-with-box-cutters plot relied almost entirely on secondhand accounts of confessions allegedly extracted from KSM under torture. The only evidence that KSM had anything to do with 9/11, other than KSM's own statements under torture, came from another torture victim, Abu Zubaida. But according to Daniel Coleman, the FBI's point man on the Abu Zubaida investigation that led to the identification of KSM as a 9/11 suspect, Abu Zubaida was a schizophrenic who would never have been trusted with any serious information. Was the schizophrenic Zubaida's statement (under torture) that KSM was involved in 9/11 reliable? Was KSM tortured into producing a false confession to support a pre-scripted official account of 9/11? If not, why has the CIA illegally destroyed the evidence surrounding the interrogations of KSM, Abu Zubaida, and other "high-value detainees"? Were these detainees "high-value" not because they had anything to do with 9/11, but because they were tortured into rubber-stamping a pre-scripted official account, making them high-value propaganda patsies? The CIA's former top on-the-ground agent in the Middle East, Robert Baer, was stunned by revelations that CIA torturers destroyed the key evidence behind the government's version of 9/11: "I would find it very difficult to believe the CIA would deliberately destroy evidence material to the 9/11 investigation, evidence that would cover up a core truth, such as who really was behind 9/11. On the other hand I have to wonder what space-time continuum the CIA exists in, if they weren't able to grasp what a field day the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are going to have with this..." (Baer himself, who now says "the evidence points to" 9/11 being an inside job, has apparently joined the conspiracy theorists who are now having a field day.)
Short version: Prosecuting the torturers will expose 9/11!
Thursday, June 25th Is Torture Accountability Action Day
A large coalition of human rights groups has planned rallies and marches in major U.S. cities, including a rally in Washington, D.C.'s John Marshall Park at 11 a.m. followed by a noon march to the Justice Department where some participants will risk arrest in nonviolent protest if a special prosecutor for torture is not appointed.
Events are planned in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco, CA; Pasadena, CA; Thousand Oaks, CA; Boston, MA; Salt Lake City, UT; Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; Las Vegas, NV; Honolulu, HI; Tampa, FL; Philadelphia, PA; and Anchorage, AK, with details available online:
http://tortureaccountability.webs.com/eventsacrossus.htm
In Pasadena at 12 p.m. PT citizens will submit a formal judicial misconduct complaint against 9th Circuit Judge Jay Bybee, former Assistant Attorney General.
Whether or not you can make it to one of the events, please do these things on Thursday:
Phone Attorney General Eric Holder and ask him to appoint a special prosecutor for torture: 202-514-2001
Email him the same request: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Fax it to him too: 202-307-6777. To easily send a fax for free, go here: http://www.peaceandjustice.it
Please do these things now:
Sign a petition to Eric Holder if you haven't already:
http://www.democrats.com/special-prosecutor-for-bush-war-crimes
Twitter this: Rallies all over US on 6/25 demanding accountability for torture: http://tr.im/pppa
Share this on Facebook: http://tr.im/ppqb