(btw I arrived here via Raw Story’s link and I’m quite chagrined that I’ve never seen your work before and clearly have some catching-up to do—and clearly need to buy a certain book!)

As a dual citizen I’ve been granted the dubious privilege of being disgusted, ashamed and outraged at the governments of both Britain (where I was born, raised and educated) and the US (where I’ve been living for over 25 years now) for their criminal war and the sheer effing balls of their lies, sanctimony and mendacious ‘justifications’ of their unconscionable actions.

Okay, so…

Regarding the present US political hooh-hah, I concur with Talking Dog who writes “To take down Reid would be stupid for the Republicans, as he is their most effective man in the Senate. That pretty much left Pelosi, who just HAD to go and step in it herself:”

Now. Pelosi has certainly been an enabler of the Republicans’ “war on terrah” policies BUT if she were as heavily implicated and culpable as her fiercest opponents suggest (or hope) it appears to me thus far that whilst there may be smoke, there’s no fire.
Yes, she was on the intelligence committee, and yes she took impeachment “off the table”, and yes her husband profited from investments in companies profiting from war related contracts, and yes she’s been suspiciously parsing her words regarding questions about a subject that really ought to be answered plainly.

BUT

If she were informed of actual torture and if she objected, she had no direct power to do anything about it at the time.
If she had leaked to the press it would invariably unfold that she was the source and she would have broken the law in the process (and broken the “unitary executive’s” bogus but practically unchallenged ‘legal’ constructs which were backed by Alberto Gonzalez’s DOJ).
When she became Speaker she STILL had no practical power to make waves.

So even if she were as pure as the driven snow, she’d have been crucified.
And if she was wholly complicit, well then of course she’s going to lie like a rug.

BUT now, when she is being called to account, she’s responding by asking for an investigation.
Doing so appears quite hypocritical given her past adamant refusals to address the obviously illegal invasion of Iraq and the obviously illegal NSA wiretapping program, but what if she is telling the truth this time?

What if she wasn’t specifically told that torture was being used but instead only being considered as dire option? And what if she did accept the possibility of torture as being perhaps necessary and useful, in the opinion of the CIA experts?

Well in retrospect she looks stupid for having accepted the notion of necessary torture, but also in the abstract she looks stupid for being so naïve at-the-time too, by any ordinary standards of morality, civility and legality.
But right-now she is being accused of being complicit in torture, and if she’s only really guilty of being stupid she’d be smart-enough by now to demand an investigation to prove her stupidity—and thus innocence—rather than being hung drawn and quartered on supposition and circumstantial evidence simply to preserve her ‘professional dignity’ as an Intelligence Committee member and/or martyr herself to a personal notion that she acted for the greater good (no-matter how flawed the reasoning).

Or could she be bluffing? Maybe, but if her general performance in Congress is anything to go by she surely doesn’t [have] the personal wherewithal to pull it off—she’s not as flaccid as Reid, but she’s no Lieberman either (why the hell did the Democrats…..?-but I digress). She just doesn’t strike me as being much of a gambler (in fact that’s her problem; she can’t tell a good bet from a bad one).

Talking Dog also remarks “I personally didn’t believe a word Pelosi had to say on the subject UNTIL Bob Graham said the same thing… as crazy as he is, I believe him, and now, since he said it, I believe Pelosi”

(For those unfamiliar who may read this, Democratic Senator Bob Graham writes-down everything he does, personally and professionally, no matter how mundane or extraordinary. Typical examples would be “8.02 a.m., weighed self, 175 lbs, brushed teeth” and then later “11.36 a.m. Discussed nuclear proliferation with Under-Sec. Defense in break room. He ate the last donut”, and “9.40 p.m. brushed teeth, still 175 lbs, went to bed”. It’s a discipline he has maintained his whole life).

I’d add that NO Republican on the intelligence committee present at the same briefings has confirmed the CIA claims about their records (which Pelosi contests and the general accuracy of which Graham’s records cast doubt upon)—and they outnumbered the Democrats something like 8:2 at the time. Why NOT?!

Well one could argue that Republicans then would be complicit too, so they don’t want to be painted with the same brush that they are painting Pelosi with, so maybe Pelosi is indeed ‘guilty’—as guilty as the Republicans.

BUT, at the same time the Republicans did, and still do claim that a) it wasn’t/isn’t torture; b) whatever it was, it was legal; c) it worked!; d) okay, it is torture, but it’s “effective” and ‘legal’ and we should keep torturing to keep us ‘safe’; e) if you even talk about torture you are abetting the ‘terrah-ists’; and e) OMG! Nancy Pelosi is LYING about what WE ARE SURE SHE WAS TOLD, WITHOUT ANY ACTUAL EVIDENCE, about OUR AWESOME TORTURE PROGRAM, and f) EVEN THOUGH WE EXPOSED A CIA AGENT WHEN HER HUSBAND REPORTED OUR WMD CLAIMS WERE BOGUS AND THEN BLAMED THE CIA FOR GETTING THE IRAQ WMD INTEL WRONG, THEY ARE TOTALLY TRUSTWORTHY IN TELLING US THAT NANCY PELOSI IS A LIAR!; and g) therefore Nancy Pelosi is a despicable human being undeserving of political office!

Phew! Now I think it’s high time I returned to the larger subject at hand.

The US government started an illegal war and the UK government joined- in.

Then they both engaged in torture in the name of human rights and the rule of law!

In the exercise of these noble goals, they abandoned humanity and the rule of law and not in some abstract way, or even as some quadratic equation where the result would be worth the effort of the calculation—they just straight-up decided that lessons of thousands of years of the development of civilization simply wasn’t relevant any more.

And the dissent and argument that is inherent in the democratic systems they were supposed to be defending weren’t relevant either.

And the supposed watchdogs of government overreach, the supposedly ‘public’ press, went-along mindlessly (and/or by cynical calculation) with the entire despicable artifice.

And more than that, STILL, after seven years of near ‘real-time’ evidence (thanks to the Internet) the politicians and the majority mainstream press are still confident enough in their own privileged positions to defend mass death, deprivation and torture and insist that all this was done for the benefit and well-being of even those who so clearly objected to such actions at the time and object now –with reason, history an fact on their side—such that the majority democratic opinion can still not just be ignored but suppressed and even oppressed, and deserves to be so due to their intellectual and moral superiority?!!

Building on the most progressive and practical political constructs of one thousand-plus years of development of British Common Law (which itself borrowed from 5,000 years-plus of formal civilization and history) combined with forward-thinking reason, the US Constitution of 1776 codified practical humanitarian ideals and a conceptual model of society that would be of universal benefit to all.

It took roughly another 200 years (from 1776) for the past global British Empire and the present global American imperium to more-wholly practice what they had preached and still preach in the echoing halls of privileged power, but it has taken just slightly less than a decade to undo it all—by promoting extraordinary violence against others, collectively and against individuals for the sake of selective advantages based ultimately on personal fantasies of exceptionalism and NOT the public good they are supposed to serve. And now these people who have tortured fellow human beings on mere supposition “in our name” who vociferously demand that those individuals who tragically abuse and torture and kill their kids are sent to prison for life or deserve the death penalty somehow deserve exemption for doing the exact same thing, but on a larger scale?!! Because they thought it was necessary?!!!

I for one didn’t agree with any of this from the start, and those that were fooled at the time have clearly become wiser by the sheer preponderance of evidence (no-thanks to most of the corporate mass media or the majority of ‘sober’ politicians).
Those that still defend torture or even argue the minutiae are hopeless and likely irredeemable, and though in the general public such persons may now be in the minority, in the hall of power they clearly and remarkably still have parity of influence and the power to at least maintain that parity.
And they should be removed from that power, for the greater good that they pretend to represent.

Once again, Andy, you seem to be scooping the world with these absolute bombshells [THE MAN WHO PROVIDED THE LINK BETWEEN SADDAM AND AL QAEDA ONLY PROVIDED THAT LINK UNDER TORTURE, AND NOW HE'S CONVENIENTLY DEAD JUST AS HE MIGHT BE CALLED AS AN EXCULPATORY WITNESS? THE BRITISH HAD A MOLE AGENT CLOSE TO OBL FOR THE ENTIRE WAR ON TERROR?] that our good old American “professional media” can’t be bothered reporting on. Well, keep it up; enough blows to the boulder, and it will eventually shatter.

Anyway, re our good old media, I knew that eventually the “torture thing” would be reduced to the “harumphing” about which Democratic politician was going to become embattled in it; there were only four possibles who were allegedly briefed at the relevant times: Jane Harman, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Bob Graham (and maybe Tom Daschle, depending on time-frame). Evidently, former House Intel ranking member Harman had the good sense to already be involved in a scandal [I always love Jon Stewart: http://bucknakedpolitics.typepad.com/buck_naked_politics/2009/04/jon-stewart-on-jane-harman-this-conversation-does-not-exist.html
and ranking Senate Intel member Graham had the good sense to be out of Congress [btw, I personally didn't believe a word Pelosi had to say on the subject UNTIL Bob Graham said the same thing... as crazy as he is, I believe him, and now, since he said it, I believe Pelosi... so you KNOW how much trouble she's in!] Anyway, w/o Harman and Graham, that pretty much left Reid and Pelosi. To take down Reid would be stupid for the Republicans, as he is their most effective man in the Senate. That pretty much left Pelosi, who just HAD to go and step in it herself:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-pelosi18-2009may18,0,1178660.story

Anyway, it’s the story our ever loyal press courtiers were hoping to have… and now they do. Serious issues reduced to celebrity/personality driven crap.

So let’s all step back and follow the real story for a minute: MI5 HAD A MAN CLOSE TO OBL, and the “best use” it could think of for him was to get low-level detainees that were already in custody to rat on themselves and others in custody [under torture, no less]! That will take a while to sink in… the incompetent criminality of our respective nations’ governments matched only by their criminal incompetence.

Again, the only word that comes close is “unbelievable”.

Your analysis of the significance of Lindh and Hicks (and, presumably, Informant A), as Westerners who had infiltrated al-Qaeda as no Western agents had managed to do — and the manner in which the value of Lindh and Hicks’ intelligence was deliberately squandered by the Bush administration — is particularly good, as is your analysis of the administration’s “amazing concern with getting detainees to rat on themselves and on each other, compared with ‘actual intel.’”

This is the heart of the whole horror show, in many ways, and is, of course, the fundamental problem with replacing FBI interrogators (and other trained professionals concerned with establishing criminal cases using techniques that wouldn’t “shock the conscience”) with CIA operatives and untrained “contractors” who were put to work reverse engineering the SERE program, which, lest we forget, was designed to produce false confessions!

As you say, “‘Unbelievable’ somehow doesn’t do justice to all of this,” and what makes it worse is that its effects tainted every aspect of the detention and interrogation of prisoners.

It’s why I’m trying to make a big noise about the discredited “evidence” in the habeas cases, and why I’m doing all I can to point out that the Obama administration seems to believe far too much of the garbage compiled by its predecessors to justify its detention policies .

As you described it, accurately, the whole of the “War on Terror” was actually about “justifying the existing course of action including the unlawful detentions and detainee torture … the torture was literally its own justification — the men we were holding were guilty, you see; they told us so under torture … and they told us that other men we were already holding were guilty.”

My article on Judge Kessler’s recent habeas ruling dealt with this:
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/05/14/judge-condemns-mosaic-of-guantanamo-intelligence-and-unreliable-witnesses/
And I have two articles coming up which will also deal with it. Contemplating the true horrors of the Bush administration’s crimes may not be easy, but I can’t think of any other way in which real “change” will be effected, and if it doesn’t we’ll all be haunted forever by the lingering effects of this vicious cycle of presuming guilt and torturing people to confirm that presumed guilt.

A supposed complaint of Western intel services, particularly the CIA, is that they were never able to get a man up close and inside of al Qaeda. With Informant A, it appears that they may well have had that– or at least, the next best thing.

But I’d like to think about “Informant A” in the context of the still broader context of other “human intelligence”– or “hum int” as the U.S. intelligence “professionals” might call it. Let’s look at him in the same frame as two other possible intel assets, one named Lindh, and one named Hicks. Both are White, English speaking Anglos– Lindh from affluent Marin County, California [his father (like me) once worked for the United States Department of Justice.] Hicks was from a more modest background, and was at times, a cowboy and a kangaroo skinner from South Australia. Still, both did what no Western intel service managed to do: they simply walked right into al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, and eventually, right into the ranks of the Taliban and its military operations. Had either man expressed a particular willingness to perform suicide bombings in the West, they would have been welcome personal guests of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri themselves. Informant A, it seems, managed to get much closer to OBL and AAZ than either Hicks or Lindh did.

Looked at in the context of “human intelligence,” these three could have been used for invaluable active infiltration of al Qaeda, or even if only interrogated conventionally, they could have been used for structural intel including operational methods, identifying people, or any number of things traditionally thought of as either “law enforcement” or “intelligence gathering”.

Instead, the concern of the Bush Administration (and its allies such as the Blair and Howard governments) became the justification for holding the low-level schmucks and plain old innocents it was already holding, to wit, scapegoating. After egregious torture (for example, Lindh was deliberately not treated for wounds, and was likely waterboarded, until he “confessed”… his confessions, btw, were made only after John Ashcroft personally intervened to deny him counsel after counsel had been requested for him), the decision was made not to take advantage of these one-of-a-kind intel assets in any kind of usual “intel” way, but instead to scapegoat the two Anglos as “enemy combatants” and try them for their ” war crimes” (their “crimes” being to participate in an armed conflict against the United States, a concept never before recognized at law), and to use the third not to get actual “intel,” but to get more “confessions” out of those scapegoats who had already been captured. And btw, one of the most useful scapegoatings to emerge from Binyam Mohammad’s mouth while a razor blade was being taken to his penis was to call out Jose Padilla’s name and accuse him of the dirty bomb plot (and God knows what else).

And this kind of reflects an amazing use of military interrogators, CIA agents and God knows who else throughout the “war on terror:” an amazing concern with getting detainees to rat on themselves and on each other, compared with “actual intel.” Think about it: men who have been held in isolation for years cannot possibly know about current A.Q. plots– the best data they would have would be several years old now. And yet, supposedly we are told (or were until recently) that “valuable actionable intel” was emerging from the torture chambers…

Well, the “value” it seems, was about justifying the existing course of action including the unlawful detentions and detainee torture… the torture was literally its own justification– the men we were holding were guilty, you see; they told us so under torture… and they told us that other men we were already holding were guilty.

As criminal as the overt acts of torture were, that our “intelligence services” wasted these kind of assets on such a trivial task as trying to justify the holding of scapegoats seems to me a crime of comparable magnitude: an opportunity to infiltrate and crush al Qaeda central was squandered to justify keeping Guantanamo open. “Unbelievable” somehow doesn’t do justice to all of this.