Nation Building
by digby
I was only half listening a minute ago as NBC’s Jim Meceda in Bagdad was describing how a woman was stripped and tortured and then taken to Abu Ghraib and terribly abused. I turned quickly to see who this latest person was who had come forward to accuse the US of inhumane treatment — only to find that it was a witness testifying at Saddam’s trial. Wow.
Until the past two years I never would have made that assumption, never, even though I’m quite aware of all the nasty things we’ve done around the world over the years, including My Lai. But when you read things like this, it’s natural to assume that any news of torture, Abu Ghraib etc. are reports of US behavior. These days, sadly, it usually is:
ABC News, citing unidentified current and former CIA agents, reported Monday night that 11 “high value” Al Qaeda terrorists had been held at a former Soviet air base in Eastern Europe and were spirited to a site in North Africa just before Ms. Rice’s arrival in Europe.
Of the 12 high value targets housed by the CIA, only one did not require water boarding [what the CIA describes as “an enhanced interrogation technique”] before he talked. Ramzi bin al-Shibh broke down in tears after he was walked past the cell of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner for Sept. 11. Visibly shaken, he started to cry and became as cooperative as if he had been tied down to a water board, sources said.
The problem for the US has been that, along with the disclosure of the existence of the “secret prisons,” there have been several high-profile cases that have highlighted US mistakes, such as US agents grabbing the wrong person, wrongly imprisoned subjects of rendition alleging they had been tortured in the countries where they had been taken, and allegations that the CIA lied to a European ally about a rendition.
The Washington Post reported Sunday on the case of Khaled Masri, a German citizen who had been the subject of a rendition and then wrongfully imprisoned for five months. When the US ambassador to Germany finally told the German interior minister about the mistake, the Post reports that he asked the German government not to disclose that it had been told about the US mistake, even if Mr. Masri went public with what happened to him. Apparently US officials feared exposure of the rendition program, and also possible legal action.
The Post reports that the Masri case shows how pressure on the CIA to apprehend Al Qaeda members after 9/11 led to an unknown number of detentions based on slim or faulty evidence, and just how hard it is to correct these mistakes in a system “built and operated in secret.”
One [US] official said about three dozen names fall in that category [those mistakenly detained]; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by Al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the Al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.
“They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association” with terrorism, one CIA officer said.
And there have been many other innocent people who have been rendered to countries and tortured, sent to Guantanamo or were wrongly imprisoned in Iraq since we began this practice. And the practice has led to more innocent people being imprisoned and tortured because those who are tortured tend to say anything they think you want to hear to make it stop. It builds on itself.
Saddam used this practice to terrorize the population to keep it in line. That is the only rational (if evil) purpose for such practices. I can’t figure out why in the hell we are doing it.
.