Torturing to Find a Non-Existent Iraqi Connection

The single event which provided the intelligence that President Lyndon Johnson used to start the series of escalations of overt U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, was at least partially fraudulent as reported at the time.  It took place in August 1964. 

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was two separate occurrences involving naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin that prompted the first large-scale involvement of U.S. armed forces in Southeast Asia.The outcome of the incident was the passage by Congress of the Southeast Asia Resolution (better known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution), which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression," including the commitment of U.S. forces without a declaration of war. The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for escalating American involvement in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). It gave the President the exclusive right to use military force without consulting the Senate, although based on a false pretext, as he later admitted.

The Vietnam war was viewed by decision makers in the Pentagon and State Department as well as the Whitehouse as part of the Cold War.  And Democrats especially were quite concerned about not "losing" any more territory to "the Communists."  Thus by 1967 over 500,000 American troops were deployed in country and American KIA were about 300 a week. And things were going bad in a hurry. 

In fact, in just a few months in 1968, it seemed the country was coming apart.  Nobel Peace Laureate Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.  Robert Kennedy who had become a candidate for President was also assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the California Primary and emerging as the likely nominee of the Democratic Party for the November Election.  Events in Vietnam such as the Tet Offensive and the siege at Khe Sanh had shown that the American strategy there was failing and a majority of Americans had turned against the war and wanted the U.S. involvement ended.  The number of Indochinese that were killed by 1968 by realistic estimation was somewhere over a million.  The United States wasn't just killing Vietnamese.  We were also bombing Cambodia and Laos.  This shows how far Lyndon Johnson unilaterally extended presidential power.  Congress declares war not presidents.

Shattering events weren't limited to the United States.  In Czechoslovakia, reformist Premier  Alexander Dubček attempts at de-Stalinization resulting in a Soviet led Warsaw Pact invasion and Red Army tanks sitting in Prague.  A General Strike occured in France accompanied by student protests over a variety of issues.  While their stated goals were largely anarchistic,  Indochina was an issue with the French students.   

Nothing progressive resulted from any of the events discussed in the two previous paragraphs and no one was predicting that the Berlin Wall would be taken down in anything resembling the foreseeable future.

In the United States,  Noam Chomsky's book At War With Asia addresses issues regarding U.S. Southeast Asia policy at the time of the Vietnam war and what the consequences might be.  It is still relevant today as it was when written.  

The intellectual culture in the United States Chomsky argues is largely subservient to power. He is particularly critical of social scientists and technocrats who he believed were providing a pseudo-scientific justification for the crimes of the state in particular those relating to the Vietnam War. He notes that those who opposed the war on moral rather than technical grounds are "often psychologists, mathematicians, chemists, or philosophers...rather than people with Washington contacts, who, of course, realize that 'had they a new, good idea about Vietnam, they would get a prompt and respectful hearing' in Washington."

The topic was inspired by articles of Dwight Macdonald published after the Second World War who "asks the question: To what extent were the German or Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments? And, quite properly...turns the question back to us: To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history."

At any rate, the American involvement in Vietnam didn’t end in 1968.  The last Americans didn’t leave Vietnam until 1975. Over 58,000 U.S. troops were killed and as already mentioned, millions more in all of Southeast Asia.  The magnitude of the current U.S. military operation in Central Asia isn’t remotely close.  And yet we have reached a point of departure for the American military effort in Afghanistan and Iraq as surely as such an instant was encountered in 1968 and Vietnam.  From this point onward, nothing is as it was before.   Like Vietnam, the invasion of Iraq was based on false intelligence.

Iraq was not part of Bush’s War on Terror, rather it should not have been.  The terror that existed in Iraq since 2003 came largely from an American occupation and the resistance to it.  It took perhaps 4 years for the majority of the U.S. population to comprehend that Vietnam was a no win situation.  Regarding Iraq, close to a majority of the U.S. population had reached that conclusion by 2004 and by the time of the 2008 national election, a significant majority of the country understood the scam Bush and his inner circle had been pulling off really from the beginning of his presidency and voted accordingly.

And yet the legacy of the Bush administration is still not close to being fully resolved.  The new president from the other major political party, in office only since the end of January,  has had time for nothing other than deal with the massive and multi-dimensional disaster the previous administration brought on the United States and in fact the whole world.  Is progress being made?  It is difficult to say and harder still to measure.  What seems clear is that since early 2002 the former president, vice-president and a large portion of the cabinet were engaged in an operation of deceit, lies and illegality that has no analog in the country's history.  

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.  Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

What now seems clear is that the Bush administration has conducted a worldwide operation of torture.  Prominent epicenters are located in a prison in Iraq known as Abu Ghraib and another prison in Guantanamo Cuba. Additionally the purpose of the torture was to obtain justification for a war of aggression against a member nation of the world organization of countries known as the United Nations or simply the UN.  According to the accepted principles of this organization as well as the rules of international law, by definition, there is never a justification for a war of aggression. Nevertheless it is obvious that invading Iraq was at the top of the agenda from the beginning of the Bush presidency.  Even when the government knew the reasons they used to justify the invasion of Iraq were not true, they continued to torture selected persons in the hope that they would say under extreme duress that such conditions did exist.  To say it differently, torture was conducted to force the admission of false information from individuals simply to end the torture they were subjected to.

I have detailed elsewhere what I think should be done with the September 11 perpetrators.  It wouldn't be pleasant.  But that isn't the issue here.  You see, September 11 wasn't the reason for invading Iraq, it was merely the excuse. 

The White House and the CIA denied a report that the Bush administration concocted a fake letter that showed a link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaida as a justification for the Iraq war on Tuesday.  The allegation was raised by journalist Ron Suskind in a new book, “The Way of the World”. The letter supposedly was written by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, director of Iraqi intelligence under Saddam Hussein. “The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind wrote. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al-Qaida, something the vice president’s office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”  

I realize that I could now rest my case if I so desired as overpowering evidence exists that everything I’ve written here is factual.    The only remaining issue is what should now be done. Probably the best one can expect would be discovering and documenting the truth to the fullest extent that can be achieved.  The past eight years have indeed been unsettling.