http://www.newsmax.com/archives/arti...0/145057.shtml


John LeBoutillier
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
The Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Scandal threatens the following:

1) To undercut our credibility in the Muslim world.

2) To make it unlikely that we can ever "win" - whatever that is - on the
ground in Iraq.

3) To cause George Bush to lose in November.


The real story has yet to be revealed:

The CIA is ultimately responsible for this moral and political disaster. The
untold story of this mess is that these pathetic U.S. soldiers and
reservists did not dream up these degrading and dehumanizing actions on
their own. Indeed, they were told to do this by CIA - and former CIA -
personnel.

Ever since 9/11, the CIA has been obsessed with gathering human intelligence
from captured al-Qaida terrorists and other Muslim suspects. CIA
interrogators have studied the interrogation techniques of our Arab allies
in Jordan, Egypt and Pakistan and learned how to 'break' a suspect in order
to get him to talk.

Fellow Muslims know how to do this - and they do things that no American
should ever do.

What happened in this case is simple: the CIA is using so-called
'independent contractors' - who are actually former CIA personnel now on
consulting contracts - for plausible deniability. They - and the U.S.
military - can deny many things because of this murky chain of command.

But the truth is clear: The 'independent contractors' came into the prisons
in Iraq and Afghanistan and ordered the poorly trained reservists 'fresh out
of McDonald's' to "soften up the prisoners before the real interrogation
begins."

Such softening up included degrading and shaming these people and breaking
their will to resist.

Then the interrogators would move in for the kill.

What were/are they looking for?

Evidence of WMD and evidence of a definitive link between Osama bin Laden
and Saddam's regime, especially involving the 9/11 attacks.

In other words, the mandate from Langley was clear: In order to justify the
war - retroactively - the interrogators were desperate to find the very
justification for the war that we should have had before the war ever
started.

What a mess!

And perhaps the worst - and most diabolical - part is the issue of "phantom
detainees." This is the instance where Iraqi prisoners were deliberately not
listed on the official roll of prisoners or detainees.

In a deliberate violation of the Geneva Convention, our CIA cutouts have
copied the Soviet and Vietnamese systems: By not listing prisoners or POWs,
they create a second system that is secret - and entirely illegal.

Apparently, many Iraqis are put into this 'second system' - and who knows
what happens to them?

It is morally reprehensible and downright un-American to lower our standards
to those of the Muslims or the Vietnamese. We have to be better than other
countries - not just by saying we are better but also by behaving better.

Bush and his underlings have greatly damaged the credibility of the United
States and of the presidency. Clinton was awful - and his sexcapades
cheapened the Oval Office. But G.W. Bush has done lasting damage - from his
obsession with Saddam instead of Osama, all the way to the exaggerations
over WMD and now to this disgusting example of a military and intelligence
world run amok.

We have all asked many times befo Why has Bush kept George Tenet on as
director of the Central Intelligence Agency?

This so-far-unanswered question may cause Bush to lose in November.