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Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Rumsfeld's dirty war on terror

The following (Part 1, Part 2) are a couple of extracts from Seymour Hersh's new book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. In his book, Mr Hersh asserts the connection between various human rights violations, including torture, committed by the US forces in the course of the war on terror, and the highest levels of the US Department of Defense leadership.

He also shines light on the government's incompetence,- which, however, appears not to be on any of the US high ranking official's "to fix immediately" list.
...the interrogations at Guantánamo were a bust. Very little useful intelligence had been gathered, while prisoners from around the world continued to flow into the base, and the facility constantly expanded. The CIA analyst had been sent there to find out what was going wrong. He was fluent in Arabic and familiar with the Islamic world. He was held in high respect within the agency, and was capable of reporting directly, if he chose, to George Tenet, the CIA director. The analyst did more than just visit and inspect. He interviewed at least 30 prisoners to find out who they were and how they ended up in Guantánamo. Some of his findings, he later confided to a former CIA colleague, were devastating.

"He came back convinced that we were committing war crimes in Guantánamo," the colleague told me. "Based on his sample, more than half the people there didn't belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces," including two captives, perhaps in their 80s, who were clearly suffering from dementia. "He thought what was going on was an outrage," the CIA colleague added. There was no rational system for determining who was important.

Two former administration officials who read the analyst's highly classified report told me that its message was grim. According to a former White House official, the analyst's disturbing conclusion was that "if we captured some people who weren't terrorists when we got them, they are now".
It is certainly comforting to know that we are not only fighting terrorists but also manufacturing new ones as we go. And aren't we all lucky to have people like Mr Bush and Mr Rumsfeld spreading democracy throughout the world?

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