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

[bigtree]

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.


read more: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/042209.html

[NewJeffCT]

1. you mean our prisoners gave us bad information?

my goodness. I'm shocked I tell ya, shocked!

[indepat]

2. Who woulda thunk it?

:P

[bigtree]

3. right

the very same info the Bush bunch is claiming kept us safe actually diverted us from the trail of the 9-11 perp suspects and played right into the plans of al-Qaeda to bring the US within reach and to goad us into polarizing militarism against the population.