Washington Post Again Flacks for Bush's Crimes
The latest example is the Post’s front-page article on Jan. 10 which offers a one-sided defense of torture in the guise of discussing how President-elect Barack Obama is under pressure over his expressed goal of prohibiting abusive interrogation of detainees in the “war on terror.”
The Post article presents those interrogation policies as an undisputed success, even quoting Vice President Dick Cheney as something of an unbiased expert in declaring that the harsh tactics “have been absolutely essential to maintaining our capacity to interfere with and defeat all further attacks against the United States.”
Throughout the article, Obama’s opposition to torture is portrayed as simply campaign rhetoric meant to appease the left-wing Democratic base and some human rights activists. Meanwhile the pro-torture position is described as realistic, hard-headed and patriotic.
“If Obama goes ahead with his plan to scrap the special CIA [interrogation] program, he could expose himself to criticism that he did not do all he could to prevent another terrorist attack,” the Post article states. It then cites a “white paper” from Bush’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence about the supposed successes of the interrogation tactics, including the simulated drowning of waterboarding.
The DNI’s “white paper” credited the waterboarding of an al-Qaeda operative known as Abu Zubaydah for forcing out the first information about Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s role in the 9/11 attacks and intelligence that helped capture another high-ranking operative, Ramzi Binalshibh.
Though the Post story appeared in the news columns – not in its reliably neoconservative editorial section – the article read more like a pro-torture opinion piece masquerading as news. The Post included no counter-arguments against the alleged value of waterboarding and other tactics which have been widely condemned around the world as torture.
If the Post had any interest in balance, it might have included at least some references to experts who have disputed the value of extracting information through torture.
For example, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, head of Army intelligence, stated in 2006 that “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”
FBI Protests
Or the Post might have mentioned the opposition to torture from trained FBI interrogators who left the Guantanamo Bay prison in disgust over the illegality and ineffectiveness of the brutal interrogation tactics that had supplanted their own approach which they felt had been working.
A Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report, released May 20, 2008, addressed precisely the Abu Zubaydah case, noting that in spring 2002, FBI agents objected to the “borderline torture” of a badly wounded Zubaydah and passed on those concerns to FBI superiors in Washington.
Disgusted by the tactics, FBI Counterterrorism Assistant Director Pasquale D'Amuro pulled the FBI agents out and complained to FBI Director Robert Mueller. D’Amuro said the harsh techniques were less effective in gleaning reliable information, complicated later prosecutions, violated moral standards, and “helped al-Qaeda in spreading negative views of the United States.”
Mueller conveyed the FBI’s concerns to Bush’s White House but was rebuffed because it turned out that the abusive tactics had been selected by the so-called Principals Committee of Vice President Cheney and other senior aides and cleared by the President.
