Bush's War on Terror

I picked up something interesting today. It's been bouncing around the blogosphere and so I apologise in advance if you've already seen it.

Via atrios, and then TPMCafe I found this at the Washington Post. You've probably seen these paragraphs elsewhere, but they're so important you might want to memorize them. It's a review by Barton Gellman of Ron Suskind's book titled The One Percent Doctrine.

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind's gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war's major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

So the guy was severely mentally ill - and they (including the Bush and Cheney) all knew it. They also knew he was "al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children" and yet according to this book, two weeks later Bush said publicly, that Zubaydah was "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States."

Take a look at what Bush actually said. We was speaking in Greenwich, CT to the Connecticut Republican Committee on April 9, 2002:

The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah. He's one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States. He's not plotting and planning anymore. He's where he belongs. (Applause.)

I'm so glad the line got applause - heartwarming, really. And what was happening at that point to this "insane, certifiable, split personality" guy who did the "minor logistics" for al-Qaeda wives and children? The review continues:

They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep.

So what do you think happened?

[H]e began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target."

I wonder how many of those plots were, well, you know, like uh true? I mean considering the man's split personalities and his state of duress under such "quaint" torture. The review ends with one last quotation from Suskind:

the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.

The important thing to note, of course, is that they knew he was mentally ill when they were doing it.

Another tidbit from the review:

"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?"

Lose face? Of course not! It's just completely ok for the United States of America to torture a man with multiple personalities and then waste the time and money (that could have been better spent elsewhere) tracking down all those torture-squeezed rantings just to make sure that Dubya doesn't lose face.

I'll say it again.

IMPEACH