Wire Report

Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing

by: Andy Worthington

(WIRE/FFF) – The story of Abu Zubaydah — a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn — has always been absolutely central to the “war on terror.” Seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, he was immediately touted¹ as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be able to “provide the names of terrorists around the world and which targets they planned to hit.” He then pretty much vanished off the face of the earth for four and a half years.

In September 2006, he resurfaced in Guantánamo, when President Bush announced that he was one of 14 “high-value detainees,” previously held in secret CIA prisons, whose existence had been resolutely denied by the administration until that point.²

In a speech on September 6, 2006, Bush finally conceded that “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war [on terror] have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency,” and claimed that when Abu Zubaydah, who he described as “a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden,” became “defiant and evasive” after his capture, “the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.”

The Infamous Torture memos

This was a reference to the CIA’s torture program for “high-value detainees,” which was first publicly revealed when a memo that purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and issued in August 2002, was leaked in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004.

However, another narrative had already appeared to challenge the one put forward by the president. In June 2006, Ron Suskind’s book The One Percent Doctrine was published³, which explained, as I described it in an article a year ago, that:

Zubaydah “turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be,” in the words of Barton Gellman, who reviewed Suskind’s book⁴ for the Washington Post in 2006. He “appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations,” and was, instead, the “go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like”…

Suskind described how, through a close scrutiny of his diaries, in which FBI analysts found entries in the voices of three people — a boy, a young man, and a middle-aged alter ego — which recorded in numbing detail, over the course of ten years, “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, the FBI’s senior expert on al-Qaeda, told his superiors, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Since then, more and more compelling evidence has emerged to demonstrate that Abu Zubaydah was indeed nothing more than a “safehouse keeper” with mental-health problems^5-6, who “claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did,” and a “kind of travel agent” for would-be jihadists, who “was not even an official member of al-Qaeda.” This included Abu Zubaydah’s own testimony at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, when he stated that he was tortured by the CIA to admit that he worked with Osama bin Laden, but insisted, “I’m not his partner and I’m not a member of al-Qaeda.”

Moreover, following on from Ron Suskind’s explanation of how “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered,” further confirmation was also provided that his torture yielded no significant information and led only to vast amounts of the intelligence agencies’ time being wasted on false leads. A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”

In addition, the details of the torture program that was specifically developed for use on Abu Zubaydah have also been revealed — primarily through a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross report, based on interviews with the “high-value detainees,” including Abu Zubaydah, and also through other Justice Department “torture memos” released by the Obama administration last April. The grim list of techniques includes waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning), confinement in tiny, coffin-like boxes, prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, and the use of violence and stress positions, sustained nudity, loud music, and noise.

Given all these facts — that the Bush administration implemented torture for use on a man whose importance was hideously overstated, which led to no useful intelligence and a hideous waste of the agencies’ time — Abu Zubaydah’s story is one of the most distressing examples of hubris in the whole of the Bush administration’s brutally inept “war on terror,” but his story has not come to an end, of course, and his continued detention, and the Obama administration’s attempts to justify it, continue to throw up new revelations, as was made clear just last week when a court submission filed by the government in September 2009 was unclassified.

In response to 213 requests by Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers for discovery in his habeas corpus petition, the government itself provided the most comprehensive rebuttal to date of the kind of claims put forward by the Bush administration in defense of its torture program, and, specifically, its claims regarding Abu Zubaydah, on the basis that requests for discovery are only relevant when they refer to claims made by the government.

In seeking to turn down the lawyers’ requests, the government revealed that it “has not contended … that Petitioner was a member of al-Qaeda or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaeda” and “has not contended that Petitioner had any personal involvement in planning or executing either the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, or the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Instead, the government now claims that the ongoing detention of Abu Zubaydah “is based on conduct and actions that establish Petitioner was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces,” and that he “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces” after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

In response, as Jason Leopold reported for Truthout:

Zubaydah’s attorneys claim that “the persons whom [Zubaydah] assisted in escaping Afghanistan in 2001 included ‘women, children, and/or other non-combatants’” and that the government has evidence to support those assertions. The lawyers also questioned the government’s history of falsehoods about their client.

“The government’s accounts frequently have been at variance with the actual facts, and the government has generally been loath to provide the facts until forced to do so,” said Zubaydah’s attorney, Brent Mickum, in an interview. “When the government was forced to present the facts in the form of discovery in Zubaydah’s case, it realized that the game was over and there was no way it could support the Bush administration’s baseless allegations. So it changed the charges.”

Mickum continued, “I’m not surprised at all that the government has dropped the old charges against our client and is alleging new charges against him. That is their tried-and-true modus operandi … [W]hen their case falls apart, they re-jigger the evidence, and come up with new charges and [say] ‘we will defend the new charges with the same zeal we defended the earlier bogus charges.’”

Since taking up Abu Zubaydah’s case and filing a habeas corpus petition in February 2008, his lawyers have always maintained not only that their client was not a member of al-Qaeda, but also that Khaldan, the training camp for which he was the “safehouse keeper,” was closed down by the Taliban in 2000 after the camp’s leader refused to allow it to come under the control of Osama bin Laden. Even the government now accepts that Khaldan was “organizationally and operationally independent of al-Qaeda,” and as Brent Mickum told Jason Leopold, reviewing all of the above, “We have never deviated from that position, and now the government admits that we were correct all along.”

These extensive concessions on the part of the government seem only to reveal that the Justice Department is painting itself into a corner with Abu Zubaydah, engaged in a slow-moving legal process, which senior officials must be hoping can be strung out indefinitely. Otherwise, profoundly difficult truths will emerge — about the extent of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, its particular futility, and, it should be noted, his relationship to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of Khaldan who turned down Osama bin Laden.

Rendered to Egypt after his capture at the end of 2001, al-Libi was tortured until he confessed that Saddam Hussein was helping al-Qaeda obtain chemical weapons, a wildly improbable scenario, which, nevertheless, was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. What makes the revival of al-Libi’s story particularly unappealing for the U.S. government is that, after years of detention in secret prisons, he was returned to Libya, where, last May, he conveniently died in prison — reportedly by committing suicide — just three days before the U.S. embassy reopened in Tripoli after being closed for 40 years.

When it comes to dealing with Khaldan, the stories of Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi not only demonstrate the Bush administration’s legacy at its most toxic and self-defeating, but also at its most cruel and pointless, from which, it seems clear, there is no easy way out.

Source(s): ¹“Anatomy of a Raid” by Tim McGirk Time/CNN • ²The White House Archives. Pres. G. W. Bush”President Discusses Creation of Military Commissions to Try Suspected Terrorists” Sept. 6, 2006 • ³“The One Percent Doctrine” by Ron Suskind 2006 • ⁴The Washington post “The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light” By Barton Gellman, Tuesday, June 20, 2006 •⁵Washington Post “FBI, CIA Debate Significance of Terror Suspect Agencies Also Disagree On Interrogation Methods” By Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus, Tuesday, December 18, 2007 • ⁶ Washington Post “Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots Waterboarding, Rough Interrogation of Abu Zubaida Produced False Leads, Officials Say”, By Peter Finn and Joby Warrick Sunday, March 29, 2009 •⁷

© 2010 The Future of Freedom Foundation

Andy Worthington – Journalist/Author
	Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

Allison Bricker

THE REGION, INDIANA – The term neoconservative may have come into more common use during the eight nightmarish years of the Bush Administration, but let us be candid, its core ideology has existed since the founding of the Republic. For there have always been those amongst us who felt that security and obedience is achieved only by pummeling into submission any slight towards the state’s fragile ego executed by the hands of its unsophisticated warmongering political administrators. Whilst Alexander Hamilton might be the pious genesis of the American embodiment towards this philosophy, whereby he was sent to meet his Creator unto the hyper-masculine ritual of pistol dueling, its renaissance began in earnest with the Wilson Administration.

President Woodrow Wilson enabled by the creation of the limitless purse provided by the then newly formed Federal Reserve, collateralized by the confiscation of current and future wages decreed under the 16th Amendment, and unchecked federal authority promulgated by tying Senators to popular knee-jerk sentiment all achieved in 1913, now began a course of “Making the World Safe for Democracy”¹. So fell the first domino in a sustained effort to forever alter American foreign policy into that of a new tradition, one of a perpetual war-footing and imperial expansion.

At the dawn of the Twentieth Century, the American people were very much opposed to intervening in the growing conflict in Europe. However, Woodrow Wilson’s personal ambition wholly contrary to his public rhetoric, was to see American entry into World War I. He saw this as an opportunity to propose his machination for global governance, i.e. The League of Nations. So much was Wilson’s desire towards achieving that end, his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan resigned in protest², citing Wilson’s Warmongering Diplomacy.

Further, President Wilson so decidedly intolerable of any form of dissent pushed for and achieved a legislative muzzle to stifle Anti-War sentiment in the form of the “Sedition³ and Espionage Acts”. Now with statutory authority, Wilson could jail and silence outspoken opponents of the war, claiming the now tired phraseology of “National Security”. The most famous of theses un-American incarcerations was Eugene Debs, the Cindy Sheehan of his day.

By the middle of the century, the American consciousness was becoming successfully manipulated into lockstep with an interventionist foreign policy. With the Central Authority spewing endless propaganda capitalizing upon the rapid growth of technology, i.e. nuclear annihilation and philosophical boogie-men, ergo “The Communist Red Scare” the state seized upon the manufactured fear to begin its chess game in earnest, funded of course by the private Central Bank. Few things fellow readers make a Central Banker’s eyes gloss over quicker than the thought of mountainous interest payments received on loans required to rebuild a war ravaged nation, continent, et al. As it is said, War is the Health of the State and a secure retirement for the Central Banker.

Fully intoxicated with the rise to superpower status, the Central Authority flexed its muscle under “The Marshall Plan” and thus now began to truly resemble the British tyrants cast off by the Founding Generation not even 200 years earlier.

It remains my conviction that through understanding history in its full prism, We the People can more fully understand the continued saber rattling on Iran and return the neoconservative philosophy to the plane of Hell especially reserved for warmongering tyrants and their Central banker puppet-masters.

While the glorious struggle to reclaim our foreign policy to that of commerce with all, tangling alliances with none will indeed be a difficult task, let us take proper stock of the situation and know that we are making progress. Last week former Vice-President Cheney became so deluged unto his hawkish tendencies that he felt it necessary to reach out to former Democrat and Rand Paul’s Senate primary opponent, Trey Grayson to try and extol the vice that is the Whig neoconservative philosophy.

For while Mr. Cheney is indeed a most tormented soul full of rage, he is no fool; a win for Ron Paul’s son in the Kentucky Senate race will be a referendum on his legacy, the Bush Doctrine. Moreover, it will further solidify that the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts was not merely dissatisfaction with President Obama, but a wider more raucous, growing dissatisfaction with Statist political philosophy in general. That it will illustrate an awakening and realization that regardless of whether a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ follows a politicians name, government continues to grow exponentially, its vacuous nature devouring our Liberty and the posterity’s financial security.

Further, it is time once and for all to refuse to accept the terms offered by the neoconservatives that those of us who prefer the wisdom of the Founder’s foreign policy, “Blame America”, as it is utter logical fallacy to the first degree.

We do not blame America; we blame the small pricked political looters who seek to enrich themselves whilst standing upon the bloodied corpses of American Soldiers killed in senseless wars upon sovereign nations of which are no threat to us outside of the contrived commotions at the behest of the CIA⁴, i.e. Iran:

Source(s): 1Making the World “Safe for Democracy”: Woodrow Wilson Asks for War – George Mason University, “History Matters” • ²The Resignation of Secretary of State William J. Bryan, 1915 JSTOR • ³Sedition Act of 1918, Brigham Young University Archives • ⁴ “Iranian scientist defects: US covert ops hurt Iran nuclear program” – Christian Science Monitor By Scott Peterson, Staff writer / March 31, 2010

Joseph Marohl

The 2009 CIA World Factbook¹ estimates that the USA ranks 180 (out of 224 nations) in infant mortality rates. The number 1 country for infant deaths is Angola. Like most of the nations with higher rates, Angola is an impoverished “developing” country. The USA, however, has a greater number of deaths in infancy than Cuba, the European Union, Taiwan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Israel, Hong Kong, Japan, or Singapore (which has the lowest infant mortality rate).

The “World Factbook” further estimates that, in 2008, the USA had 8.27 deaths per 1,000 people. Its death rate in general, then, is lower than the rates in Japan or the European Union, but still higher than those in Canada, Cuba, China, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, Brazil, India, South Korea, Chile, Iran, Israel, Iraq, Mexico, Singapore, or the United Arab Emirates (which has the lowest overall mortality rate). Last year, the USA had 3.03 more deaths per 1,000 than Iraq (5.14)!

US citizens have an average life expectancy of 77.85 years, lower than the United Kingdom (78.54), Germany (78.8), France (79.73), Italy (79.81), and Canada (80.22),

According to the New York Times², in 2006 Canadians spent $3,678 per capita on health care. US residents spent $6,714 per capita. (About 38% of that difference can be explained by the difference in the two countries’ economies. But even with numbers adjusted to accommodate that difference, US Americans paid $1,141 more per person for health care than Canadians.)

The “National Coalition on Health Care” states:

“Although nearly 46 million Americans are uninsured, the United States spends more on health care than other industrialized nations, and those countries provide health insurance to all their citizens.”

In 2007, health care spending represented 17% of the gross domestic product of the USA. In 2008, the increase (5%) in employer health insurance premiums was double the rate of inflation. Health care spending in the USA is over four times the amount spent on national defense.

The AFL-CIO reports, “Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007, while consumers paid more for less coverage.”

Ron Williams, CEO of Aetna, earned $24,300,112 in 2008, making him the highest paid health insurance company executive. (In 1910 all the corporations in America paid less in taxes [$24,043,500] than Williams earned 98 years later.)

President Obama has introduced and supported the idea of a public option in health insurance coverage, a compromise between the current model of private insurers (as supported by the American Medical Association and fiscal conservatives) and the social-services model of public health (as practiced in Canada, the UK, France, Cuba, and China).

A public health insurance option means that the government would provide health insurance in competition with private health insurers, with the intention of driving down health care costs in America and insuring the millions of Americans now without health coverage of any kind. Only one health insurance provider or a closely tied group of providers covers 94% of metropolitan areas in the USA, with the effect of limiting competition in those communities and driving up healthcare costs. A public option could benefit from having lower administrative costs (Medicare, for instance, provides coverage with a lower overhead than the average private insurer can). If the public option proves popular and competitive, private insurers would likely lower rates to compete.

Centrist Democrats appear to be in a bind because, on one level, there is great popular support for the public option—65-85% of Americans support it, according to a variety of polls—while, on another level, health industry PACs contribute generously to Democratic and Republican campaigns—and (this is awfully cynical, I know) actually doing something about health care in America would rob them of the campaign issue that “somebody ought to do something about health care in America.”

According to Nate Silver, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia has received $69,000 in contributions from health industry political action committees, even though he has served less than six months in the Senate. Like the 20 other senators currently “uncommitted” to a public health insurance option, Warner is a Democrat. (Except for Olympia Snowe, all the Republican senators oppose the public option.)

Opponents assert that a public option would be both inferior to private-sector insurance and destructive to private insurers. Their reasoning is that, although public health care would be (in their opinion) inferior, more people would gravitate to it because of its relatively low cost.

Some people object to a public option on principle, believing that the government should not interfere with lawful free enterprise (especially given the precarious position of the US economy now), and on practical concerns, believing that the government would be a less efficient provider of healthcare benefits than the current private insurers.

Many of these opponents attribute the USA’s lagging health statistics to factors other than the free market and/or monopolies, while others continue to tout the USA’s relatively good health statistics in comparison to nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

I unapologetically support so-called “socialized medicine”—on par with “socialized” highways, postal service, military defense, and public education. I don’t claim that such an approach to health care is perfect and without problems, but it does appear to me that, after decades of comparison, we can see greater benefits in, say, the British National Health Service than we Americans currently enjoy, and greater risks—large numbers of uninsured Americans and increasing bankruptcy due to high healthcare costs—in our current system.

Obama has chosen a compromise that I would not consider desirable—except for political expediency. However, the idea of a “public option” seems better than the status quo, at least—especially given my firsthand experience with increasing insurance premiums and deductibles and the rather shockingly streamlined “drive-thru” (though hardly “fast”) approach of the private medicine I have recently experienced.

Source(s): ¹C.I.A. 2009 World Factbook • ²The New York Times “Why Does U.S. Healthcare Cost so Much? (Part 1)” by Uwe E. Reinhardt/ published November 14, 2008 • ³National Coalition on Health Care “Health Insurance Costs” • ⁴AFL-CIO NOW Blog “Health Insurance Profits Soar as Industry Mergers Create Near-Monopoly” May 27th, 2009 •

The Smoking Argus

Editor’s Note: No official Statement is available from Senator John McCain’s office.

Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona compares the struggle for American Independence to the ongoing protests in Iran. He attempts to oversimplify opposition by stating that those seeking to link the C.I.A. to the current Green Revolution based on the C.I.A.’s 1953 overthrow of then Iranian Prime Minister Mossadeq are both cynical and on the wrong side of history. Finally, Senator McCain admonishes the Iranian regime for conducting brutal torture and spreading fear of a feigned foreign enemy as a means to justify a loss of liberty domestically.

Source(s): Senator John McCain’s Official YouTube Channel

The Smoking Argus

“The Century of Self: The Engineering of Consent” is the second part of the award winning documentary by British documentarian Adam Curtis. Whereas he first episode provided insight to the origin of consumerism, this second installment illustrates how  in post-WWII America, many came to believe that the basic animal instincts, as theorized by Sigmund Freud, were the root cause behind the rise of Nazism. Thus, in order to prevent the “animal” ever being unleashed in the future; academics, corporations and governments sought a way to manipulate and “domesticate” the human animal.

Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The United States government, corporations, as well as the C.I.A.   used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. However these were not merely a cynical exercises in manipulation, as those in with the reigns of power believed that the only way to make the world “safe for democracy” and create a stable society was to repress basic human instincts that simmered just under the surface of post-war suburbia.

Jeff Lewis

One of the great lines from Saturday Night Live was delivered many years ago by Martin Short’s brilliant comedic character, “Ed Grimley”, when he described a situation as,” Doomed as doomed can be!” That summarizes my prognosis on the theocratic regime that has ruled Iran since 1979. With events of this past week, the disciples of the world’s first cyber revolution have passed the point of no return.

WARNING: Graphic Video

The graphic scene of the young woman, Neda, bleeding to death from a fatal gunshot on the streets of Tehran has become the symbol of the upheaval caused by the controversy surrounding the recent national election. Civilian control apparatus is in high gear as the ruling clerics attempt to quell the insurrection of hundreds of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets throughout the country. Wounded demonstrators are being beaten savagely, pulled out of their houses at night, and even arrested at hospitals. Some families trying to reclaim the dead bodies of murdered relatives are being charged a fee for the bullets expended by security forces that remain logged within the victim’s corpse.

The Iranian authorities are taking every step possible in interfering with electronic transmissions from all sources that are broadcasting messages to the world about the emerging atrocities of governmental suppression of the dissenting demonstrators. The Guardian Council issued a statement that there were no fraudulent voting incidents and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, said all those people who continued to demonstrate would be dealt with as traitors.

Republican Senators John McCain (AZ) and Lindsey Graham (SC) are criticizing Obama’s tepid response as a failure to lead on an issue that should require him to be aggressive in his denunciation of Iran’s rulers. Other Republican members of Congress are carping at Obama about not leading the free world’s outrage over the unfolding events in Iran, notably Mike Pence (R-IN). Representative Pence compared President Obama’s reticence to Ronald Reagan’s bold declaration to Gorbachev regarding tearing down the Berlin Wall, in 1987. Not all Republicans are as quick to demagogue the issue, however. Indiana Senator, Richard Lugar, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, feels Obama is wise to keep his cool, for now, as events continue to unfold. Pat Buchanan, MSNBC’s right wing firebrand, praised Obama’s stance as did Conservative columnist George Will on last Sunday’s ABC regular broadcast. Mr. Will even criticized Obama’s detractors by name.

MSNBC, CNN, and all the major old-media networks, have interviewed dozens of guests including Iranian expatriates, college faculty, and American citizens with family still living in Iran. The old-media has called for America to be supportive of the demonstrators, but not to overplay their hand and provide Ahmadinejad with the excuse to castigate the U.S. as “The Great Satan” that is fueling the discord in their country, as has been done since the 1979 revolution. In his Cairo speech, President Obama admitted the CIA’s role in deposing a popularly elected government in Iran in 1953. Iranians have also not forgotten that the U.S. supported their archenemy, Saddam Hussein, in their brutal war with Iraq in 1982 where over a million Iranians were casualties.

Most of Obama’s critics do not take into account the history of unpopular U.S. involvement in Iran over the last sixty-years. The short sightedness of that view was articulated last Thursday during an interview on MSNBC’s, “Hardball”, with host Chris Matthews and Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss (GA). Senator Chambliss said he thought that America’s previous transgressions against Iran happened long enough ago that they were largely forgotten by the Iranians of today. Matthews missed an opportunity for a great follow up question to Chambliss when he failed to ask the Georgia Senator, “When did Georgians stop remembering General Sherman?”

For his part, President Obama has steadily ramped up his criticism of Iran’s ruling theocracy, but in his news this past Tuesday, he allowed that events are continuing to unfold. However, the days of government by theocracy in Iran are numbered. This youthful generation in Iran, those 30 and under, which amounts to over sixty percent of the country’s total population, are the products of the emerging technology that is changing how the world interacts. It will take several months to make changes in Iran sufficient to quell this culture of the future, but one thing is for certain, history does not have a reverse gear.

China is next.

Allison Bricker

Al-Qaeda’s third in command, Mustafa Abul-Yazeed, said in an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera¹ today, that he is praying Taliban forces are able to capture Pakistani nuclear weapons as they continue fighting their way towards Islamabad. In April of this year, Taliban forces captured the “Swat Valley region” and are now approximately sixty-miles outside the Pakistani capitol.

Abul-Yazeed also goes on to say during the interview that hostilities will only cease when the United States removes its forces from all Muslim countries and quits supplying military funding to nations hostile towards Muslims, namely Israel. Foreign policy experts, the C.I.A., and Representative Ron Paul have also cited our interventionist foreign policy as the root cause of what is known as “blowback”, i.e. the motivation to commit acts of terrorism against the United States.

Source(s): ¹ “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Authorized Edition)” by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, published by:W.W. Norton & Co. July 22, 2004

• ² Al Jazeera News Network, “Al-Qaeda commander threatens US” orignally aired June 22nd, 2009

• ³ “Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror” by Michael Scheuer, Potomac Books Inc. March 4, 2005

• ⁴ “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” by Robert Pape Random House Trade Paperbacks – July 25, 2006

• ⁵ “Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” (American Empire Project) by Chalmers Johnson Holt Paperbacks January 4, 2004

Allison Bricker

CAIRO, EGYPT -  In his speech today, President Obama acknowledged and apologized for the United States’ role in the 1953 CIA/British backed overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government. This marks the first time in history that a United States President has ever publicly spoken about U.S. involvement of the 1953 coup. The operation codenamed, Operation Ajax, was a classified CIA mission headed up by Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of former President Theodore Roosevelt tasked with carrying out  a covert regime change of then Prime Minister Mossaddeq’s government. The overthrow came shortly after he [Mossaddeq] nationalized Iranian oil fields which had formerly been under the control of British Petroleum. Operation Ajax would be the first among several successful CIA backed coup d’états.

Former Presidential Candidate and Texas Congressman Ron Paul, spoke to this type of aggressive foreign policy during the 2008 Republican Presidential Primaries. In a now infamous exchange between Dr. Paul and former New York Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, Dr. Paul educated Mayor Giuliani on the 9/11 Commission report’s sentiments and the CIA definition of the word ‘blowback’ as consequences to the continued practice of  suc imperial interventionism.

Source(s): Breitbart “Obama admits US involvement in Iran coup in 1953″ •  CIA.gov “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror”

Joseph Marohl

I appreciate the improvement in tone of the Obama administration over its immediate predecessor, for example, Obama’s statement in Turkey that America, though enriched by its Christian population, is “not a Christian nation”; even the President’s espousal of his personal faith has, so far, avoided the arrogant display of ignorance and bullying bluster of Bush.

Obama has lifted bans on stem-cell research and the abortion bans linked under Bush to international aid. On Friday, Obama condemned homophobia in particular no less than intolerance in general in a speech at Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum—an inclusiveness that is poignant in light of the surge in gay bashing in the past decade and the growth of hate groups in America since his election.

All these examples speak of a bright new spirit in the leadership and values of our nation.

But President Obama has everything to gain or lose over the issue of whether to investigate those in power who promoted or condoned the use of torture of terror suspects.  So far, he appears to be failing a crucial test of integrity.

Fox TV has repeatedly criticized the President’s release of formerly classified memos showing the government’s deliberate attempt to whitewash torture techniques and to approve specific techniques, namely waterboarding, that have been used as torture since at least the Spanish Inquisition and condemned by American military courts trying foreign war criminals for the past 65 years. Fox TV pundits say that the President’s act is politics, a threat to security, an aid to the nation’s enemies.

The White House has defended its action on the basis that the information had already appeared in the media—in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere. Besides, precautions were taken to blacken out names, supposedly to protect the innocent or the legally covert. And, unlike the Valerie Plame “outing” in 2003, the White House appears to have little to gain politically from the release of this information.

The burning question is—What does the President intend to do with this information?

In his original statement to the press, Obama exempted CIA operatives who participated in torture but did so with an understanding that they were acting within certain legal bounds. In World War II and other cases, soldiers were prosecuted only for exceeding the bounds of laws existing at the time—“following orders” was a legitimate defense that many Nazis who did not just follow orders tried illegitimately to use to save their necks at Nuremberg.

Obama can reasonably justify not prosecuting low-level personnel—unlike the 2004 attempt to quiet the Abu Ghraib scandal, where investigations and prosecutions did not rise higher than low-ranking GIs.

Then last Sunday, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel announced that the Bush policymakers, namely John Yoo and Jay Bybee, whose support of torture is documented in the released memos, would likewise be exempt from further investigation and prosecution. But then later White House aides intimated that the President did “not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques.”

Troublingly, in public addresses, Obama has echoed Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s dribble that we should not waste time, money, and energy to “look back” to offenses in the past. (As one commenter to Noonan’s original statement put it: “Great news for hit-and-run drivers.”)

Obama told an enthusiastic crowd of CIA employees, “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn.” But the government’s detailing of specific torture techniques and fostering an air of institutional and public acceptance of what it euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” can hardly be called a simple mistake.

On Tuesday, an internal memo by Dennis Blair, Obama’s national intelligence director, was publicized, stating, “High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” Blair seems to support at least the underpinning assumption that the Yoo-Bybee interrogation policy was effective.  Obama, in turn, has left the matter in the hands of Attorney General Eric Holder, who is less shy of the word “torture” and has called for the release of even more memos detailing the U.S. government’s support and defense of torture.

To my mind, torture is a bigger issue than the economy. The cost of investigating and prosecuting those of both political parties who were actively or tacitly behind the senseless, brutal, and unjustified beatings of detainees fraudulently in the name of the American way of life and at the expense of justice-loving American citizens is worth more than ten General Motors and fifty Bank of Americas.

And if we taxpayers could fork out $6.2 million to investigate a blowjob in the Oval Office, we owe at least as much to our sense of ourselves as a just, moral, tolerant, and humane people.

Government funds are at least as justly spent in supporting the rule of law as in supporting military actions abroad and sustaining economic growth.

One of the reasons we elect a President every four years is to permit the opportunity to investigate and legally address the flaws—both simple mistakes and flagrant illegalities—of the previous administration. If he or she does not do so, why bother with term limits or even elections?

Our nation’s much-praised propensity for “smooth transitions” distinctly implies that we transition to something new and different from its precedent—not continuation of the same, and not erasure of recent memories of injustice and lawlessness.

If Obama does not address the wrongs of the previous administration, he betrays the fundamental reason for his (or any new President’s) election: change.

If he does not push the investigation and prosecution of injustices committed in the name of America, he does nothing to build the nation’s reputation for democracy and rule of law.

If he does not look into charges of wrongdoing in the Bush administration, even if he  and (less likely) his political party could remain blameless of those wrongs, he furthers the erosion of American values and liberties and, in this case, leaves torture as a tool for future leaders with a bent towards tyranny and a cruel streak.

Jeff Lewis

This past week we witnessed the “Tea Bag” Tax Protest. It was an orchestrated event that was co-opted, or hijacked by rightwing extremists and Republican conservatives from Ron Paul’s vocal, but normally civilized followers. The purpose for the protest was designed to draw attention, ostensibly, to multiple contemporary evils: excessive taxation, excessive government spending, and excessive insensitivity from our national political leadership.

The “Protest” allowed participants the chance to use inflammatory rhetoric that often characterizes such gatherings.  One of the unique aspects of this cause celeb was the contradictory outcries of “Socialism” and “Fascism”, plus numerous Obama hate messages.  It reminded me of the conundrum one of my innovative professors in college once posed in a political theory lecture that began with the rhetorical question, “Can any one succinctly explain the difference between communism and capitalism?”  After several seconds of deafening silence, he answered by saying, “In Communism, man exploits man.  In Capitalism, it’s just the opposite.”

The national network television news media in general acknowledged that the protest was grass roots, in nature. This aspect was driven home repeatedly by the Republican Party leadership and the Fox television news personalities, two entities often in political lockstep, prior to and after the event.  House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), called the event “Astroturf” because of the overt push it received from fat cat donors and Fox network talking heads.

While the President participated in a gathering of Western Hemisphere political leaders on the island of Trinidad, the release of the DOJ “torture memos” started a firestorm that, I believe, has the potential to sprout a genuine grass roots movement. Obama’s progressive supporters on the Democratic side of the aisle, or his own political family, are aggressively circulating a petition on the internet calling for the prosecution of all those governmental agents in the previous administration who participated in the policy that created the alleged tortuous acts.  The petition’s import is in direct opposition to Obama and the Attorney General’s promise not to prosecute any CIA operatives that may have direct involvement in carrying out these acts, as described in graphic detail in the previously classified DOJ documents.  Obama and Eric Holder have promised those CIA participants taxpayer supported legal defense, because the perpetrators were acting on advice from the DOJ, or, just carrying out orders from higher-ups.  The Nuremburg trials, immediately following WWII, featured prosecutions of Nazi’s, “Just following orders.”

One of the most compelling aspects of Obama’s campaign was his representation that among the “change” he would bring about was his vow to restore America’s moral authority in such matters. As he positioned himself against unjust prosecution of a misguided war, he promised transparency in his leadership in direct contradiction to Hillary and later McCain.  On Wednesday night, progressive stalwart, Keith Olberman of MSNBC, vehemently editorialized on Obama’s decision in this area and unequivocally stated, “Mr. President, you are wrong!”  Ooops!  Up jumped the first “family feud” in the Obama bunkhouse.  Among the graying and balding heads of Obama progressives are veterans of “real grass movement” protests from the 60′s.  Millions of these folks were on the front lines on behalf of civil rights and anti-war (Vietnam) conflagrations that occurred throughout the Republic with intensity and, on many occasions, with ferocity.  It is important to remember that Obama was born in 1961, therefore his memory of these cataclysmic struggles are not indelibly etched in his memory tapes.

At the present moment, Obama has opened a significant rift with conservatives that are outraged at his approved revelation of the previously top secret classified memos, and the bedrock of his political support, by saying he was turning a blind eye toward the perpetrators of these deeds.  Deeds, which are specifically prohibited by international treaties, of which our country is signator.  The president’s position is on a collision course.  The potential problems of this controversy are not inherited like the economic hand of cards he walked into upon his election.  Obama has chosen this present course entirely of his own volition.

In my judgment, President Obama is about to get a “real education” in presidential decision making and “grass roots movements.”