Torture Scorcher

OK-- so let's get a few things straight.

When Rumsfeld said it was a "few bad apples" that were responsible for the Abu Ghraib, he was lying. The Levin report now conclusively establishes that Rumsfeld himself authorized 15 of the interrogation/torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib.

The torture techniques cribbed from the Pentagon by the CIA were based upon communist-era Chinese torture techniques that were originally designed to elicit false confession from U.S. soldiers-- not true confessions.

We captured Abu Zubaydah in March 2002 and tortured him in August 2002 to gain information on imminent attacks on the U.S. If he was in the brig for five months, whatever information he might have had would no longer be of the "imminent" kind, right?

Abu Zubaydah, whom Bush portrayed as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States" was really just a low-level gopher. And even worse, CIA and FBI analysts quickly realized that he was mentally ill-- yeah, that's right-- Bush (who allowed the execution of a mentally retarded man in Texas) allowed the torture of a brain-injured man.

It has also come out that the real reason torture was authorized by the White House was in order to backfill missing intelligence that connected Al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein (intel that we now know never existed, since the Iraq war was a bogus war concocted by Bush).

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions. Nearly all of the leads attained via torture quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaydah -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced.