Gord's Notebook : Bush /Cheney/Rumsfeld Regime Used Torture To Get False Confessions & False Statements To Give The Regime Cover For Its Real Agenda In Iraq & Is Obama's Silence Tacit Approval Of Torture???

Forgotten stories include the released "Trophy Photos" of the Kill Team who boasted about hunting down and killing innocent civilians. Were they a rogue unit or a few bad apples or did they believe given the culture of the military, Pentagon and White house which then as now has a cavalier attitude about killing civilians whom they refer dismissively as merely "Collateral Damage". If the information leaked over the last nine years or so is to be trusted then the killing of civilians even on purpose was routine by US personnel and possibly by the British and Australians and other US allies.
Tens of thousands of civilians were wantonly abused, tortured and killed all in the name of freedom and Democracy and Radical Evangelical Christianity. There are in fact many rank and file soldiers and commanders who believe the USA is involved in a Christian Crusade against Islam and other non-Christian religions.

For more see: Trophy Photos Of Dead Civilians Released of US Soldiers "Kill Team" While Americans Rationalize and Make Excuses For the " Inexcusable"
Gord's Poetry Factory , March 22, 2011

The US has decided to attack Libya -the question is why Libya and not one of the other half-dozen or more countries now facing massive popular uprisings.

Why for instance does Hillary Clinton and President Obama defend the use of Bahrain's military against its own citizens. The Obama administration is even defending Saudi Arabia which has invaded Bahrain with thousands of troops and , armored vehicles and tanks etc. to crush the Bahrain uprising.

If the Saudis can take such action then it would be reasonable for other countries facing popular uprisings to use force against demonstrators and to appeal to their allies for support given this precedent . So interfering in Libya on the part of the "insurgents" by the US and its allies while allowing the Saudis to invade Bahrain .

So if one of these nations were to ask for instance Iran to help them crush an insurgency then the US would have to live with such a move.

Common sense should also inform the US and its allies to take responsibility and blame for what these dictators whom they support and supply arms to giving them "Carte Blanche" as long as they do not in some way refuse to do America's bidding.

"If protecting civilians from evil dictators was the goal, though -- as opposed to, say, safeguarding natural resources and the investments of major oil companies -- there’s an easier, safer way than aerial bombardment for the U.S. and its allies to consider: simply stop arming and propping up evil dictators. After all, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi reaped the benefits from Western nations all too eager to cozy up to and rehabilitate the image of a dictator with oil, with those denouncing him today as a murderous tyrant just a matter of weeks ago selling him the very arms his regime has been using to suppress the rebellion against it.

In 2009 alone, European governments -- including Britain and France -- sold Libya more than $470 million worth of weapons, including fighter jets, guns and bombs. And before it started calling for regime change, the Obama administration was working to provide the Libyan dictator another $77 million in weapons, on top of the $17 million it provided in 2009 and the $46 million the Bush administration provided in 2008.

Meanwhile, for dictatorial regimes in Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, U.S. support continues to this day. On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even gave the U.S. stamp of approval to the brutal crackdown on protesters in Bahrain, saying the country’s authoritarian rulers “obviously” had the “sovereign right” to invite troops from Saudi Arabia to occupy their country and carry out human rights abuses, including attacks on injured protesters as they lay in their hospital beds"

Quote from: Instead of Bombing Dictators in Libya and Around the World, Stop Selling Them Bombs If the bitter lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan has taught us anything, it's that wars of liberation exact a deadly toll on those they purportedly liberate. by Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis at Alternet.org, March 23, 2011

In the midst of various major news events from the Crisis in Japan, to the popular uprisings in the Middle East and Africa and popular uprising by Americans to resist the Tea Party Republicans attack on the rights of workers some important stories have been missed or buried or ignored by the Mainstream Media.

Two of these forgotten stories shed more light as it were on the Bush' Regime's war on terror.

Firstly there is the story mentioned above about the US "Team Kill" which was discussed here a few days ago.

Secondly there is the story providing more evidence of the Bush Regime's use of torture and their real reasons for using torture.

The Bush Regime after 9/11 decided to ignore International Agreements such as the Geneva Conventions and the special agreements on the treatment of POWs and the ban on the use of torture and other agreements on the use of Napalm phosphorus , cluster bombs and landmines and the responsibility of the state in dealing with enemy combatants who are designated as being "Child Soldiers".

Obama administration after all of the eloquent speeches about the rule of law and that America should not be in the business of torture Obama is still not interested in pursuing criminal investigations of the Bush Regime and its use of torture and the War Crimes the US committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama's position has not changed Even though Truth Out .org has revealed it has more evidence that the Bush Regime knowingly committed acts of torture not to get actionable intel but rather to provide cover for their lies and propaganda concerning Saddam and the rationale for the Iraq War.

Captain Michael Kearns, who took a graduate course in cognitive psychotherapy in 1988 taught by Jessen, still can't comprehend what motivated his former colleague to turn to the "dark side."

"Bruce Jessen knew better," Kearns said, who retired in 1991 and is now working on his Ph.D in educational psychology. "His duplicitous act is appalling to me and shall haunt me for the rest of my life."

Truth Out.org revealed it has some hard evidence of how the Bush Regime devised its torture program and its underlying purpose after 9/11.

We now know with certainty that the Bush administration consulted psychologist Dr. Bruce Jessen who originally some ten years before acted as a designer and trainer of a program designed to help American personnel especially those involved in covert operations in preparing them to develop better cognitive skills to deal with the physical and psychological impact on them if captured and tortured.

The Bush/Cheney /Rumsfeld neocon cabal used this program to train US personnel in the use of such techniques on detainees .

The would be interrogators or torturers US personnel were also taught about the psychology behind the application of torture . They were informed that the main purpose of the use of torture is to break a prisoner/detainee with the aim of compliance but not as a means of getting actionable intel.

Those being trained were told that using torture for interrogation purposes would be useless because anything the detainee says has been compromised because the aim of the tortured detainee is one of survival and therefore to do or to say anything which will end the torture . So people detained who were in fact innocent were willing after undergoing torture to make false confessions and to implicate others and to make false statements about the connections (which did not exist) between Saddam 9/11 and AlQaeda and other terrorist organizations and provide bogus information on Saddam's non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction.

And now even more damaging evidence has been made available exclusively to Truthout.org detailing how the Bush regime used consultants to develop a "torture regimen" to break detainees (POWs) incarcerated by the U.S. military CIA etc.

Truthout.org has been given access to the hand written notes of psychologist Dr. John Bruce Jessen who is considered the main architect of the Bush/Cheney torture program.

His notes contradict the Bush Regime's rationalizations for the use of torture or what is euphemistically referred to as "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" ot "Torture Lite" which include techniques used under the Obama administration as it claims such techniques do not count as torture which in fact contradicts the definition of " torture" as defined in International Agreements on the treatment of POWS or Enemy Combatants.
The POWS or "Detainees" are to be treated at all times humanely and with common decency .

Jessen's notes were discovered by Kearns who was one of Jessen's colleagues who worked with Jessen in 1989 on a program designed to help covert CIA and military operatives working undercover in foreign countries to be better able to resist torture if they are captured .The participants were being taught to use various psychological techniques to protect their mental stability and integrity agasinst the onslaught of a variety of torture techniques.

In these notes written some twenty years ago Dr. Jessen explains that the reason torture is used is not to gain actionable intelligence but rather to break individual prisoners to make them more compliant and willing to do as they are told by their captors. The prisoners are then made to make false confessions and to implicate others and to make false statements which were basically dictated to them. So for example American held alleged terrorists would make false statements proving the connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorist attacks and other terrorist activities around the globe and the building and stockpiling of WMDs by Saddam.

Dr Jessen's notes along with other leaked information contradict the Bush administrations assertions..." that the torture techniques used on "war on terror" detainees were utilized as a last resort in an effort to gain actionable intelligence to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests abroad.

".. Rather, as Jessen's notes explain, torture was used to "exploit" detainees, that is, to break them down physically and mentally, in order to get them to "collaborate" with government authorities. Jessen's notes emphasize how a "detainer" uses the stresses of detention to produce the appearance of compliance in a prisoner."

The program Dr. Jessen worked on in 1989 and beyond was originally developed explicitly for "Special Mission Units" to better prepare them and to keep them from being broken as it were if they were captured and tortured .

"

....Jessen, then the chief of Psychology Service at the US Air Force Survival School, immediately started to work directly with Kearns on "a new course for special mission units (SMUs), which had as its goal individual resistance to terrorist exploitation."

The course, known as SV-91, was developed for the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) branch of the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, which acted as the Executive Agent Action Office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jessen's notes formed the basis for one part of SV-91, "Psychological Aspects of Detention."

So the Bush Regime used torture techniques not to derive actionable intelligence but rather to get false confessions and lies which could be used by the Bush Regime to provide evidence to support their claims about Saddam and why the USA had no choice but to invade Iraq to take down Saddam .
The Bush regime claimed to have evidence that Saddam was connected to various terrorist organizations and was in the process of developing WMDs to attack its neighbors including Israel and was conspiring to unleash WMDs nerve gas or other toxins or nuclear weapons on America.

The evidence against Saddam as such was not reliable and was manufactured by manipulating detainees through the use of torture and by trusting unreliable informants who had their own agenda ie the alcoholic con-artist Chalabi and other disgruntled Iraqi expatriates each of whom had their own agenda .Chalabi for example had hoped to be installed as the new president of Iraq after the US invasion.
They also fabricated evidence for instance of Saddam acquiring or attempting to acquire uranium Yellow Cake in Niger.

EXCLUSIVE: CIA Psychologist's Notes Reveal True Purpose Behind Bush's Torture Program Tuesday 22 March 2011 by: Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report

Bush administration officials have long asserted that the torture techniques used on "war on terror" detainees were utilized as a last resort in an effort to gain actionable intelligence to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests abroad.
...Indeed, a report released in 2009 by the Senate Armed Services Committee about the treatment of detainees in US custody noted that torture techniques approved by the Bush administration were based on survival training exercises US military personnel were taught by individuals like Jessen if they were captured by an enemy regime and subjected to "illegal exploitation" by their captors. The committee's report said Jessen wrote a "Draft Exploitation Plan" in April 2002 the US military used at Guantanamo and at prison facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jessen also co-authored a memo in February 2002 on "Prisoner Handling Recommendations" at Guantanamo. Both of those documents remain classified.

...Jessen's notes, prepared for an Air Force survival training course that he later "reverse engineered" when he helped design the Bush administration's torture program, go into far greater detail than the Armed Services Committee's report in explaining how prisoners would be broken down physically and psychologically by their captors. The notes say survival training students could "combat interrogation and torture" if they are captured by an enemy regime by undergoing intense training exercises, using "cognitive" and "exposure techniques" to develop "stress inoculation."

...Kearns said the value of Jessen's notes, particularly as they relate to the psychological aspects of the Bush administration's torture program, cannot be overstated.
"The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered - not just 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar," he said. "What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen's instruction. It is exploitation, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to 'reverse-engineer' a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press."

..."Understanding the Prisoner of War Environment," Jessen notes how a prisoner will be broken down in an attempt to get him to "collaborate" with his "detainer."

"This issue of collaboration is 'the most prominent deliberately controlled force against the (prisoner of war)," Jessen wrote. "The ability of the (prisoner of war) to successfully resist collaboration and cope with the obviously severe approach-avoidance conflict is complicated in a systematic and calculated way by his captors.

"These complications include: Threats of death, physical pressures including torture which result in psychological disturbances or deterioration, inadequate diet and sanitary facilities with constant debilitation and illness, attacks on the mental health via isolation, reinforcement of anxieties, sleeplessness, stimulus deprivation or flooding, disorientation, loss of control both internal and external locus, direct and indirect attack on the (prisoner of war's) standards of honor, faith in himself, his organization, family, country, religion, or political beliefs ... Few seem to be able to hold themselves completely immune to such rigorous behavior throughout all the vicissitudes of long captivity. Confronted with these conditions, the unprepared prisoner of war experiences unmanageable levels of fear and despair."

...However, according to the Senate Armed Services Committee report "SERE resistance training ... was used to inform" Yoo and Bybee's torture memo, specifically, nearly a dozen of the brutal techniques detainees were subjected to, which included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, wall slamming and placing detainees in a confined space, such as a container, where his movement is restricted. The CIA's Office of Technical Services told Yoo and Bybee the SERE techniques used to inform the torture memo were not harmful, according to declassified government documents.