Iraq – Page 4 – Antiwar.com Blog

Corrected: Gina Haspel Did Not Torture Zubaydah, Apparently

~~Not only did the new CIA Director personally oversee the torture of Abu Zubaydah, she did so in order to lie you and your mom into supporting the aggressive war against Iraq.~~

From David Rose’s report “Tortured Reasoning“:

Some of what he did say was leaked by the administration: for example, the claim that bin Laden and his ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [Zarqawi was not an ally of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden -editor] were working directly with Saddam Hussein to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. There was much more, says the analyst who worked at the Pentagon: “I first saw the reports soon after Abu Zubaydah’s capture. There was a lot of stuff about the nuts and bolts of al-Qaeda’s supposed relationship with the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.”

Within the administration, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation was “an important chapter,” the second analyst says: overall, his interrogation “product” was deemed to be more significant than the claims made by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, another al-Qaeda captive, who in early 2002 was tortured in Egypt at the C.I.A.’s behest. After all, Abu Zubaydah was being interviewed by Americans. Like the former Pentagon official, this official had no idea that Abu Zubaydah had been tortured.

“As soon as I learned that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done,” the Pentagon analyst says. “I was so angry, knowing that the higher-ups in the administration knew he was tortured, and that the information he was giving up was tainted by the torture, and that it became one reason to attack Iraq.”

Says here Zubaydah wasn’t moved to the black site in Poland until late 2002. Not that I know she wasn’t there too, but “soon after Zubaydah’s capture” means on Haspel’s watch in Thailand it seems fair to conclude.

By the way, Zubaydah was not even a member of al Qaeda at all, much less their “Number 3 Lieutenant.”

Update: Pro Publica has completely retracted their story claiming that Gina Haspel was in charge of the torture dungeon in Thailand at the time Abu Zubaydah was held there.

He was still tortured into lying us into war with Iraq, but not by her, apparently.

Scott Horton Presentation: The War on Terror: A Global Catastrophe

Wednesday, February 7th Antiwar.com opinion editor Scott Horton will be giving a presentation for historian Thaddeus Russell’s Renegade University about the War on Terrorism.

New Interviews by Scott Horton

I was interviewed recently by Stefan Molyneux, Jason Stapleton and Dave Smith. You know, about the wars and things.

Cross-posted at the Libertarian Institute.

16 Articles That Expose How They Lied Us Into War in Iraq

A list of must-reads compiled by Scott Horton for the anniversary of the start of the Iraq War

Blowback: Paris Terror Suspect Radicalized by Outrage Over American Torture and Invasion of Iraq

One of the Paris terror suspects was radicalized by outrage over American torture and the invasion of Iraq. The Huffington Post reports:

“The Associated Press said that Cherif Kouachi was tried in 2008 for helping funnel fighters to Iraq and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Kouachi told the court at the time that he was outraged by images that revealed the torture of Iraqi inmates by U.S. guards at the Abu Ghraib prison, according to the AP.”

And The New York Times reports:

“Chérif’s interest in radical Islam, it was said at the 2008 trial, was rooted in his fury over the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, particularly the mistreatment of Muslims held at Abu Ghraib prison.”

NY Times Deceived Americans on WMDs and Iraq Once Again, This Time with Help From The Drudge Report

Last October, The New York Times ran a story about the effects of abandoned chemical weapons in Iraq from a program that was abandoned in the early 90s, and so had nothing to do with Bush Administration WMD accusations that were used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. However, the “Paper of Record” (which played such a large role deceiving the public in the run-up to the Iraq War) gave the article a headline that read, “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons,” and that did not give any indication when the weapons were abandoned. This deceptiveness was compounded when the massively popular conservative news aggregation web site The Drudge Report linked to the story with a huge, top-level, even more deceptive headline that read, “NYT: PENTAGON HUSHED IRAQ’S USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS.”

That was all it took for confirmation bias to take over, as conservatives all across the country leapt on the deceptive headlines (of course, not bothering to read the actual article) as a permanent talking point for claiming that it was right to invade Iraq all along, since Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction after all.

And now, three months later, we see the fruits of that deception. RT today reported on a new survey conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind that found that, “4 in 10 Americans erroneously believe US found active WMDs in Iraq.”

“PublicMind noted that the discovery of degraded chemical weapons in Iraq – likely leftover materials from a program that ended in the early 1990s – might explain some confusion. The presence of these weapons was first reported in October 2014.”

Of course, it wasn’t the “discovery” itself that caused the confusion, but, once again, shoddy, unprofessional, and irresponsible (if not downright mendacious) journalism.