Robert Parry: How Bush's Torture Helped al-Qaeda

[laststeamtrain]

How Bush's Torture Helped al-Qaeda

By Robert Parry
April 23, 2009

Captured al-Qaeda operatives, facing the threat or reality of torture, appear to have fed the Bush administration’s obsession about Iraq, buying Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders time to rebuild their organization inside nuclear-armed Pakistan

Even now, as al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies expand their power ever closer to Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, ex-Bush administration officials continue to insist they protected U.S. security by repeatedly waterboarding the likes of 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and terrifying others, such as Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, with “extraordinary renditions” to foreign countries known to torture.

However, the emerging evidence, including recently released Justice Department memos, suggests that the “high-value detainees” may have helped divert U.S. focus away from their al-Qaeda colleagues by providing tantalizing misinformation about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and dropping tidbits about Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who operated inside Iraq.

<snip>

In that sense, the interests of Bush’s neocon foreign policy team and al-Qaeda were symbiotic. The Bush administration was determined to force regime change in Iraq while al-Qaeda was desperate for a respite from U.S. and NATO assaults in late 2001 and 2002. So, diverting U.S. military and intelligence resources toward Iraq bought al-Qaeda leaders valuable time.

As the U.S. military got bogged down in the Iraq War, al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies strengthened their safe havens inside Pakistan and began expanding their areas of control, threatening to destabilize the fragile government of Pakistan, the only Islamic country that has a nuclear bomb.

<snip>

So, the “enhanced interrogations techniques” may have had two deadly consequences: eliciting misinformation that helped lead the United States into the quicksand of Iraq (while al-Qaeda and its Islamic fundamentalist allies strengthened their position in nuclear-armed Pakistan) and contributing significantly to the deaths of more than 4,200 American soldiers in Iraq.

<more>

http://consortiumnews.com/2009/042209.html

[enough]

1. k&r

[babylonsister]

2. Rec'd. Heckuva job, idiot son. nt