Interesting that the CIA shut down an FBI interview of a 9/11 suspect...
"The documents show that the FBI was involved, albeit to a lesser extent than the CIA and the US military, in the interrogation of prisoners at Guantánamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and secret “black site” prison in a number of third-party countries.
"Significantly, the FBI doubted the legality of the CIA’s methods, the documents reveal. So much so, in fact, that unnamed figures in the FBI contemplated prosecuting CIA personnel for torture—among them a CIA agent who threatened to torture a prisoner with a power drill—and it ordered agents not to participate in CIA interrogation sessions in which “enhanced” techniques were used.
"In another instance, an FBI agent who traveled to a secret prison seeking to interrogate Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a suspect in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, found him 'naked and chained to the floor.' The agent said that he had obtained intelligence from al-Shibh in 45 minutes of interviewing him before the CIA 'shut down the interview.'”http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/tort-n04.shtml----------------
In addition to the sheer horror and US criminality that these redacted memos contain, and the identification of Rumsfeld as the Bushwhack operative who "micro-managed" these crimes--the above item (that the CIA shut down an FBI interview) points to an investigative line, that needs to be pursued, that Bushwhack torture was being used for something else than for "keeping us safe." I don't believe that anything the Bushwhacks did had the purpose of "keeping us safe." So what were they torturing people to find out?
One of their more visible and obvious motives was making huge amounts of money and looting us blind. You can see that motive nakedly operating in the Iraq War, in Katrina, in tax cuts for the rich, in everything they did. Another motive of theirs is covering their tracks. We can see this, for instance, in the Gonzales memos, trying to contrive some way to make torture look legal. And a third obvious motive was power--enhancing their power to make money and to cover their tracks. In my opinion, the principle players of the Bush regime had NO good motives--none! They were a putsch, a coup, a gang of thieves and mass murderers, who took over our government with two stolen elections and a lot of other contrivances, both subtle and brutal--and, very unfortunately and tragically, our political system is so corrupt and so weakened by global corporate predators and war profiteers that it put up no resistance. The Democrats and the well-meaning Republicans (if there are any at all--I sometimes wonder), and those believe in the rule of law, mostly just caved.
So, if you have this powerful, conscienceless gang with all the powers of government at their command--including a great war machine, and police powers, etc.--and including the assumed power to declare their own acts legal, no matter how illegal they are--why would they extend their reach to something as ugly and as dangerous as torture, and what they did they use it for?
Ugly, if the public and the world found out--poisonous of foreign relations, and a kick in the face to the American people (who overwhelmingly oppose torture). Dangerous, because of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (risking ire of the military, and leaks down the line, by conscience-struck soldiers) and the Geneva Conventions (US law since the end of WW II, based on reaction to Nazi concentration camps--protection for prisoners of war, humane treatment).
Hubris may be involved in their use of torture. Law and conscience had been destroyed by the 2000 Supreme Court initial putsch (and also, nine months later, by 9/11). Anything goes, in the pursuit of money and power, was their mode. The Plame-Brewster Jennings outings also reveal hubris. Directly attacking the CIA was very risky. But I don’t think they took that risk or the risks of torture simply out of hubris.
What would such a gang use torture for? Or, more precisely, what would such a gang
need torture for, that would outweigh the risks? Some guesses:
--to cover their tracks on 9/11 (finding out who knew what, killing witnesses, covering up money trails)
--to gain full control of terrorist networks for future use (eliminating rogue jihadists who might actually believe in what they're doing, have religious motives; and establishing many more controllable terrorists)
--protecting and enhancing profitable, criminal trade in nuke and other weapons (meanwhile destroying the CIA counter-proliferation network--Plame and Brewster-Jennings--to eliminate "eyes and ears" on their weapons trade, and to use their criminal weapons networks to manufacture justifications for war on Iraq and Iran); torture for finding out and eliminating rival weapons traders, gaining more control of the "market"
--drug trade (Afghanistan)--same motives
--general use of torture (on someone who stole bread, and or did nothing at all--random arrests and torture) mainly as cover for the targeted purposes but also to terrorize the civilian populations, to create mayhem/chaos and to destroy character especially in the military--to putrify the souls of young soldiers to make them more like Bushites.
Those are just some of my guesses. This info that the FBI objected--or some objected--points both to the internal struggles in the government of "rule of law" types of people vs the lawless Bushwhacks, which were occurring within the military as well--and it also may point to how Rumsfeld was finally ousted and his mad plan to nuke Iran was stopped.
As to that, I think what happened is that a delegation of Daddy Bush and his "Iraq Study Group," military brass and other powers went to Bush/Cheney in circa late 2006, and offered them a deal--no nuking of Iran in exchange for no impeachment/prosecution and getting rid of Rumsfeld. The true motives for the torture may have been one weapon they had to convince Bush/Cheney to agree, and also to dislodge Rumsfeld. Another weapon may have been Rumsfeld's complicity on 9/11.*
I think Junior was in BIG doo-doo by this time (maybe even at risk of a CIA assassination, for the Plame-Brewster Jennings outings), and with a "house divided" (Bush/Rove vs Cheney/Libby over who would take the fall for those outings), then Katrina happened, and Junior was exposed for the duffus he is, with his handlers knifing each other in the background--and Daddy Bush, Leon Panetta (old CIA) and the rest of the ISG acted to rescue him, and the motives of other power players involved vary (the military brass were up in arms on a number of things, including the prospect of China and Russia coming in, on Iran's side, and a nuclear war going out of control; corpos & politicos--war and torture were becoming "bad for business"--for instance, the Bushwhacks were "losing" South America, a much closer and easier to get source of oil, and the economy was collapsing under the burden of debt and utter lawlessness in the financial sector).
This may be where Pelosi's odd statement, "Impeachment is off the table," came from. It had literally been offered up to get Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld's finger off the button--and soon afterward, the threat of the US nuking Iran went away.
The incident described in the memos--the CIA stopping an interrogation of a 9/11 suspect by the FBI--raises the question: why did they stop the interrogation? One reason could be that the FBI had gotten too close to a piece of information or trail that could lead to Rumsfeld. We'll probably never know exactly how the FBI interview was halted--who gave that order--but the CIA torturers themselves may not have been aware of the true object of the torture, and halted the FBI interview on orders that they didn't understand the purpose of. Or maybe they or some of them, or the operational boss, were complicit. My guess would be that most of the torturers didn't know the reason for certain questions that were handed to them from higher ups--nor why they were supposed to stop the FBI from finishing that interview. The memos also reveal Rumsfeld's detailed following of these dreadful proceedings. And, as I said, I don't think "keeping us safe" was his motive. So what was he looking for? Why was he micro-managing these criminal actions?
The answer might be to guide the questioning along the lines of what he wanted to know--for profit, power and coverup purposes--to halt questioning when it got dangerous, to monitor the torturers for what they knew or were finding out (and in the case of the halted FBI interview, to stop the FBI from finding something out), to obtain the names/locations of people who needed to be snuffed (with Cheney's death squads?), to obtain info with which to control criminal networks, to kill the victim at some point if "necessary," and so on.
Our political commentary on things like this is often much too polite. I understand the need not to make "wild charges," etc.--things you can't back up--or I can understand that need in certain venues, and in dealing with the corpo-fascist press and our putrid political establishment (which has used the epithet "tinfoil" to prevent investigation of many crimes). But, when you're addressing monstrous crimes, and the monsters who have committed them, you can become so persnickety and legalistic and dry, and so cautious, that the full horror of what they did is muffled, and the political will to hold people accountable and to prevent further horrors are damaged. Rumsfeld was micro-managing these horrendous acts for a
reason. Ask yourself, what was the reason? And does the answer "to keep us safe" have any credibility--particularly with regard to someone, Rumsfeld, who was willing to risk Armageddon, to gain control of another oil source? And if the answer is NOT "to keep us safe," what IS the answer? Why was he micro-managing torture?
So I stand by these speculations. I think they are reasonable guesses--based on things that ARE known, and on the character of the Bushwhacks (their utter lawlessness, greed and destructiveness)--and they point to investigative trails that need to be followed.
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*(I do think Rumsfeld was the main operational figure on 9/11. He pulled all NORAD decisions into his own hands three months before 9/11, and then was apparently AWOL during the attack. "In a meeting," he said--didn't know it was happening. NORAD's unprecedented lack of response to the attack was arranged via a war game scheduled that day of a similar attack, and Rumsfeld being unavailable to verify that the attack was real and to okay a response. And if this is the case--that Rumsfeld is Mr. LIHOP--somebody in the military would be in the best position to know it. I don't know who all may have been complicit, on the political end--Cheney, for sure, possibly even Daddy Bush--but as the operational figure, Rumsfeld was expendable and liable and blackmailable. Whatever they used to oust Rumsfeld, he ceased being Sec of Defense for the final two years of Junior's reign and attacking Iran went away.
(One remnant of his attack plan may have been that incident where the Iranians caught the British sailors in their territorial waters--a few months after Rumsfeld was ousted. That maybe was a "Gulf of Tonkin" type set up. It ended with smiles and jolly good laughs all around. I thought at the time that the Iranians were just being
very smart. But Pelosi went over to Syria and Israel at that very moment, so I think what occurred is that the attack was called off. Maybe some US/UK commander hadn't gotten the word, or the planned incident had just gone forward of its own momentum, but its purpose had been nixed. My fantasy is that Pelosi was taking the word particularly to Israel--along with fulsome assurances of continued US support--and to other parties in the Middle East, that attacking Iran had been taken "off the table.")
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