Left News and Views

Now that we have learned that the CIA — in a new comedy of craziness by that ill-begotten agency – has destroyed hundreds of hours of videotape taken while torturing two “high level” detainees, the relationship of torture and America’s loss of the moral high ground are once again being hotly debated.

Fortunately, Congress seems to be coming to its senses and House and Senate conferees have reportedly come to an agreement on an intelligence measure mandating that all agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, comply with the Army Field Manual’s outlawing of torture. The manual properly reflects American law by explicitly proscribing the gamut of torture measures — including waterboarding — that have proved dear to the heart of administration zealots.

According to the New York Times, already complaining about the possible return to sanity, a White House spokesman said, “The C.I.A. program has provided valuable, actionable intelligence,” and dismissed Congress’s Army Field Manual initiative as “dangerous and misguided.”

Par for the course.

Except for the Jack Bauer crazies, most thoughtful expert interrogators agree that more often than not torture leads to false intelligence … and the United States’ embarrassing execution of the “war on terror” will probably become a text-book example of this principal.

Take for example all the hoopla surrounding the uncovering of a plot by a group of home-grown terrorists with sinister code names who sought help from al-Qaida to attack the tallest US building, the103-storey Sears Tower in Chicago.

The story of this Miami terror cell couldn’t stand up to the light of day. The members of this supposedly Jihadist cell were not Muslim and the only link to “al-Qaida” was that of a government agent provocateur. The seven alleged plotters were mostly unemployed men from a poor suburb of Miami who had no weapons, explosives or money, and were so disorganized they asked their “al-Qaida” contact for uniforms and boots for their “Islamic army”, and a camera to take pictures of their target.

Or how about the much hyped plot to blow up multiple transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives? Unlike many of those caught up in the vast net of America’s war on terror, the alleged ringleader of this plot got his day in court – in Pakistan no less – and was cleared of terrorism charges and of being a member of any terrorist group. How many thousand of bottles of perfume, water, baby formula and medicines ended up in airport trash bags as a consequence of that “terror plot?”

In his 2006 State of the Union address, President Bush said, “We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies have prevented, but here is some of what we do know: We stopped an al-Qaida plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast.”

He was referring to the purported plot to knock down the 73-story building in Los Angeles, the one once known as Library Tower. But within hours of the original report, it was also revealed that authorities in Los Angeles had had no idea Bush was going to make any of the details — whether serious or fanciful — public.

When it was ultimately revealed how farcical this scheme was, the LA Times quoted a source who debunked the Library Tower story and said that those who could correctly measure the flimsiness of the scheme “feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan than that of the president.”

We could go on with the alleged terror plots – remember Fort Dix – that were ultimately proved baseless, although we are still suffering the loss of liberties created by many of them. Although not all were hatched by someone using their imagination to avoid torture, it is certain many were.

These and many of the other terror plots were based on this administration’s concerted effort to convince Americans of the illusion that terror cells are lurking around every corner waiting to cause mayhem – an argument they use to justify torture. The Bush agenda depends on the proliferation phony terror threats in order to continue the farcical war on terror and take more of our innate freedoms at home to stifle dissent.

On November 3, 2008, perhaps we can begin the long “torturous” road back to sanity.