If you haven’t heard it yet please check out this excellent audio interview with Scott Horton and Robert Parry, discussing the issues I mentioned. Parry goes far deeper than his article and I think you will be quite interested. http://antiwar.com/radio/2009/09/12/robert-parry-9/

The OPR report delay is absolutely about politics. The report has been finished now for about a month.

The key thing about Durham’s investigation is that we don’t really know exactly what his mandate is yet. If, like Alberto Mora, he is restricted from going up the chain of command than it will indeed be a whitewash. However, I have heard that Durham’s probe into the destruction of the torture tapes has been very meticulous.

We shall see.

I have to thank you for the link to Robert Parry’s article (and works)… the reference could not have been better chosen — more on point — for the issues and concerns I’d mentioned. I’ll be spending quite a bit of time with his work.

The delay on the OPR report is curious… and a tad concerning, as it smells a tad like ‘polity manipulation.’ Not that a government would ever deliberately engage in such a thing, of course.

If Holder & Co. are following Elizabeth de la Vega’s “go slow and get convictions” strategy of careful, methodical, “don’t scare the fish” approach to criminal prosecution, then I’m in favor. If, alternatively, its just more “don’t distract us from bigger priorities,” then I’m both opposed and disappointed.
Not knowing which it is — while time moves on, memories fade, and witnesses die — is maddening.

Thanks again…

Helgerson’s response to Sandberg (at der Spiegel) that she “was basically correct” about the OLC memo of August 2002 being a retroactive permission slip for conduct already engaged in, followed immediately by his clarification that it was instead a formalized memorialization of an earlier oral authorization jumped right out at me when I read it.

There’s been speculation of a “back channel” between OVP (Addington) and OLC (Yoo), and as noxious an authoritarian scumbag as Yoo has proven himself to be, it is precisely that authoritarian-follower mentality, IMHO, which would have directed him to seek orders from “up the chain” regarding CIA’s request for the OLC “oral OK” and then the later-written legal cover memo(s).

Wilkerson says the paper trail leads straight to Cheney, and Cheney and Addington both were vociferous opponents of decisions made during the Reagan years to permanently shelve torture and ban it worldwide… and they wasted no time, it would seem, in bringing it back once they were in a position to do so.

So I have to wonder: why? Torture’s only actual efficacious purpose is for the terrorization (and subjugation) of populations. How deeply involved was Cheney himself (along with Addington) in the terror campaigns — featuring U.S.-trained torturers — in Central and South America in the 1970’s and 1980’s? What is Cheney’s specific purpose behind what appears to have been a long-standing intent to return torture — population terrorization and subjugation — not just to both the CIA and the U.S. military, but also to a wholly-unaccountable private contractor mercenary force (whom Judge Laurence Silberman, on the Court of Appeals, has just immunized)?

Cheney is very busy making it abundantly clear that he is not going “gentle into that good night,” so I am very concerned about what his long-term game plan actually is, what his targets are, and where his “Team B” is. $9 billion in palletized, shrinkwrapped cash just evaporated… and we assume that’s just the tip of the iceberg (how much rake-off was there from the TARP, and to whom?). A whole lot of people who should be a whole lot more loudly active about the business of investigation and prosecution of these war criminals seem way too damn intimidated… and many of those same people were so absolutely unrestrained in their endlessly loud outrage at Clinton’s blowjob. I don’t think that mere rank partisan hypocrisy explains it.

So… I remain very concerned.

Thanks for all your great work, Jason

Appreciate your insightful comments. I think Wilkerson is dead on. He conducted his own investigation into torture/abuse at the urging of Powell after Powell had been been briefed by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Wilkerson said he found a paper trail that led directly to Dick Cheney, David Addington and Donald Rumsfeld and the entire narrative that we have been told is just plain wrong

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/09/09/an-interview-with-col-lawrence-wilkerson-part-two/

Thanks for setting me straight. I was confusing the two bogus reports (attacks against financial institutions & shopping malls) with the ‘dirty bomb’ plot that Zubaydah revealed prior to being waterboarded.

Col. Wlkerson’s March article, describing how it was known early on that the battlefield vetting was pure chaos, and a comment he made in his recent interview with Andy Worthington, suggest to me the pivotal importance of the role of myth-making in the whole sordid affair.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lawrence Wilkerson: But it was something this administration almost made a cult of doing — not just on interrogation, but on almost everything, whether it was Iraq, whether it was the Middle East in general, whether it was North Korea. The attitude was: Don’t talk to me from a position of expertise, talk to me from a position of fixed religious adamancy, you know.

Andy Worthington: Exactly. And again, that was the story that impressed me in Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side, when, after understanding that there were so many “Mickey Mouse prisoners,” as General Dunlavey called them, John Bellinger, who, at the time, was the National Security Council’s Legal Advisor, went to try and have a meeting with Alberto Gonzales, when he was still Bush’s Counsel, and found David Addington there, and Addington said, we’re not bothered about what you’ve got to say about innocence and guilt. The President has said they’re all guilty on capture, that’s the end of the story, nobody’s reviewing it. You know, it’s an example of justifying actions on the basis of executive power. . .
http://pubrecord.org/torture/5086/cia-ig-zubaydahs-torture-preceded-john-yoos-torture-memo/comment-page-1/#comment-596

Wouldn’t that make this a variation of the Nuremberg defense? Just following the orders of “The Big Man Upstairs,” a cosmic tyrant who governs a political mechanism, the state, by kinetic activity, is that what they were doing? Talk about your “faith-based” policies, how does Life as Holy War sound, eh?

Fr this reason, I agree with Col. Wilkerson’s assessment of Cheney: he’s crazy. He seems to be suffering mythic inflation, in which one’s ego inflates to mythic proportions.

Our mythology is one of a war-god who governs his creation with fiat and force; what’s so surprising if our actions express that belief? That archetype is both the reassuring Father, and the scarecrow with which one can easily herd the American electorate.

How did we get jacked to war? I think it’s obvious: it’s the mythology!

They knew they were capturing innocent people and torturing them for information the detainees couldn’t possible have, some of them to death. That’s not self-defense, that’s human sacrifice on the altar of their fears.

Say you step on a cat’s tail, and it shrieks; now what? Duct tape its mouth shut? Step on its head? Why not stop inflicting pain, see how that works out for a change?

Nope, can’t do that. Force is what we believe in. Remember Tom Engelhardt’s article, “Crusading in the Arc of Instability”?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“This unkind assessment,” adds Maalouf, “accurately reflects the impression made by the [crusaders] upon their arrival in Syria: they aroused a mixture of fear and contempt, quite understandable on the part of an Arab nation which, while far superior in culture, had lost all combative spirit.”

Americans, despite heavy competition, now look like the new barbarians of the arc of instability — and things are going to get worse. Don’t think the calling of air power into downtown Baghdad is likely to be forgotten. This is the behavior of barbarians, no less so than the use of suicide bombs in Baghdad’s streets.

The Church of Our Man of Global Domination

So think of this as Bush’s crusading scorecard for the years 2001-2007 — this record of barbarism with its guarantee of a “whirlwind of blowback,” as Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times puts it, and the unmistakable look of a war against Islam.

In truth, the most obvious factor linking all of the above together, however, the real thing they have in common, is not, in the normal sense, religious at all. If there is a religious war going on, waged by men (and a few women) of faith, then that faith is neither Christianity, nor Judaism, nor is the war against Islam per se. It comes instead from the fundamentalist Church of Our Man of Global Domination and at its heart is the monotheistic religion of Force. If the arc of instability were inhabited by recalcitrant, angry, sometimes armed, and sometimes destructive Buddhists, sitting on vast energy reserves, this war would look like a war against the Buddha himself.

The essential doctrine of faith that ties all the disparate foreign-policy acts of this administration together is the belief that to every global problem, to every difficult situation, there is but a single striking and uniform response — not the application of democracy, but the application of force.

In its pursuit of force as a faith, the Bush administration has managed to lower the bar on all applications of force by any state (just as it has raised the value of a nuclear arsenal and so, despite its threats of war, lowered the bar on the proliferation of those weapons). This is but a small part of the price a regime of force must pay when force is such an inadequate instrument in our world. The single most striking aspect of Bush foreign policy is that, over and over, it is revealed to be a quiver with but a single arrow in it. If things are going well, you reach back, take that arrow of force, or the threat of it, and notch it into your bow. If things are going badly, you do the same. For an administration so focused on the domination of planetary resources, its officials have, in fact, proven themselves remarkably resourceless.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/158512/crusading_in_the_arc_of_instability

HA! Look, there’s Pepe Escobar, I planned on quoting him next:

The New Great Game is not only focused on the face-off between the United States and strategic competitors Russia and China – with Pipelineistan as a defining element.

The full spectrum dominance doctrine requires the control of the Pentagon-coined “arc of instability” from the Horn of Africa to western China. The cover story is the former “global war on terror”, now “overseas contingency operations” under the management of President Barack Obama’s administration.

Most of all, the underlying logic remains divide and rule. As for the divide, Beijing would call it, without a trace of irony, “splittist”. Split up Iraq – blocking China’s access to Iraqi oil. Split up Pakistan – with an independent Balochistan preventing China from accessing the strategic port of Gwadar there. Split up Afghanistan – with an independent Pashtunistan allowing the building of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline bypassing Russia. Split up Iran – by financing subversion in Khuzestan and Sistan-Balochistan. And why not split up Bolivia (as was attempted last year) to the benefit of US energy giants. Call it the (splitting) Kosovo model.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KI03Df01.html

Clearly, to this poet, our beliefs about how the world works and our proper role in it, that is, our mythos materializes our realities. It’s in this mythic context that US actions make the most sense to me.

IMO, there’s an effort underway, to transform the president into somebody’s idea of god, the better to remake the world in their own self-righteous image.

It’s the mythology of dominance, dammit!

Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator does indeed say that Zubaydah Identified Padilla. Whether Padilla was actually plotting to build a dirty bomb is another story.

But, Soufan said in this NYT op-ed that defenders of torture like Dick Cheney say that waterboarding Zubaydah, and subjecting him to other torturous methods, produced results. Here’s Soufan: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23soufan.html

“Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.”

I think Soufan was trying to put out a clue; that Zubaydah was tortured before the issuance of the torture memo.

Jose Padilla (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%29

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-june-11-2002/headlines—dirty-something

Headlines – Dirty Something
The U.S. government announces a month-old arrest of an American citizen who was working with Al Qaeda to set off a dirty bomb on U.S. soil.

Tags: terrorism, Al Qaeda, Headlines, war on terror, America, George W. Bush

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jose Padilla (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%29)

Padilla was arrested in Chicago on May 8, 2002, and was detained as a material witness until June 9, 2002, when President George W. Bush designated him an illegal enemy combatant and transferred him to a military prison, arguing that he was thereby not entitled to trial in civilian courts. Padilla was held for three-and-a-half years as an “enemy combatant” after his arrest in 2002 on suspicion of plotting a radioactive “dirty bomb” attack. That charge was dropped and his case was moved to a civilian court after pressure from civil liberties groups.

On January 3, 2006, he was transferred to a Miami, Florida, jail to face criminal conspiracy charges. On August 16, 2007, José Padilla was found guilty, by a federal jury, of charges against him that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was widely described in media as a suspect of planning to build and explode a “dirty bomb” in the United States, but he was not convicted on this charge.

On January 22, 2008, Padilla was sentenced by Judge Marcia G. Cooke of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida to 17 years and four months in prison. His mother, Estela Ortega Lebron was relieved but announced that they would appeal the judgment: “You have to understand that the government was asking for 30 years to life sentence in prison. We have a chance to appeal, and in the appeal we’re gonna do better.”[1].