Ex-Official: Bush Panicked After 9/11
A former State Department lawyer tells The Associated Press that the Bush administration panicked after 9/11 and tortured prisoners.
Former President George W. Bush denied anyone was tortured. But Vijay Padmanabhan is at least the second insider to publicly describe as torture the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" used by the U.S.
Padmanabhan was the department's chief counsel on Guantanamo litigation. He says it was "foolish" for the Bush administration to declare that detainees were beyond the reach of U.S. and international laws and the Geneva Conventions.
He told the AP Friday that "Guantanamo was one of the worst overreactions of the Bush administration."
Last week, another former official in the Bush State Department publicly criticized the administration for its Guantanamo policies.
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, said many detainees locked up in the prison camp were innocent swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants
"There are still innocent people there," Wilkerson told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."
Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a "mosaic" of intelligence.
"It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance," Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather "sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified."
Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during the early stages of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent with no meaningful attempt to discriminate "who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation."
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney fought efforts to address the situation, Wilkerson said, because "to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."
Wilkerson told the AP in a telephone interview that many detainees "clearly had no connection to al Qaeda and the Taliban and were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pakistanis turned many over for $5,000 a head."
Some 800 men have been held at Guantanamo since the prison opened in January 2002, and 240 remain. Wilkerson said two dozen are terrorists, including confessed Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was transferred to Guantanamo from CIA custody in September 2006.
© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Former President George W. Bush denied anyone was tortured. But Vijay Padmanabhan is at least the second insider to publicly describe as torture the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" used by the U.S.
Padmanabhan was the department's chief counsel on Guantanamo litigation. He says it was "foolish" for the Bush administration to declare that detainees were beyond the reach of U.S. and international laws and the Geneva Conventions.
He told the AP Friday that "Guantanamo was one of the worst overreactions of the Bush administration."
Last week, another former official in the Bush State Department publicly criticized the administration for its Guantanamo policies.
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, said many detainees locked up in the prison camp were innocent swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants
"There are still innocent people there," Wilkerson told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."
Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a "mosaic" of intelligence.
"It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance," Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather "sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified."
Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during the early stages of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent with no meaningful attempt to discriminate "who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation."
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney fought efforts to address the situation, Wilkerson said, because "to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."
Wilkerson told the AP in a telephone interview that many detainees "clearly had no connection to al Qaeda and the Taliban and were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pakistanis turned many over for $5,000 a head."
Some 800 men have been held at Guantanamo since the prison opened in January 2002, and 240 remain. Wilkerson said two dozen are terrorists, including confessed Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was transferred to Guantanamo from CIA custody in September 2006.
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"Indeed, none of the Nazis who proclaimed a positive attitude toward Christianity in public revealed themselves as anti-Christian in private. Therefore the insistence that the Nazis practiced "sheer opportunism" or placed a "tactical restraint" on their supposed hatred for Christianity "which had been imposed during the years of struggle to achieve power" cannot be sustained."
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)
Posted by j_mcdonald-2009 at 2:27 PM : Apr 1, 2009
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In Konrad Heiden's book "A History of National Socialism" on page 100 he quotes Hitler's publicly expressed opinion about God and religion: "We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany." In Josef Goebbels' notes in a diary entry in 1939: "The F?hrer is deeply religious, but deeply anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay." So, contrary to what you may have been led to believe, we have here both a Hitler historian and a Hitler close associate who assert that Hitler was not Christian.
Nazi Germany was the outward expression of Hitler's ideology. Regardless of the number of citizens in Hitler's Germany who were Christian themselves, the government that Hitler established in Nazi Germany was anything but Christian. Calling Nazi Germany a Christian nation just because there happened to be Christians living there makes about as much sense as calling a burning house a fire station just because there happen to be firemen inside it trying to put the fire out.
Unlike Hitler, Christ admonished his followers to turn the other cheek and to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Christ never imposed his views on anyone and never incited others to violence. There is nothing even remotely similar to Christianity found in the ideology underpinning Nazi Germany. No reputable historical account of the Nazi reign of terror has ever described it as Christian. Survivors of the Nazi holocaust have never referred to Nazi Germany as being Christian and have never claimed that Christian ideology had anything to do with why Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews. History teaches that Nazism needed help from no other ideology than its own to justify the abominable actions that occurred under its European reign of terror.
If Nazi Germany was not atheistic, then perhaps you can tell me what non-atheistic affiliation Nazi Germany had. It certainly was not Christian.
Posted by IrishWench1 at 7:45 PM : Mar 29, 2009
I'm trying to find out, too.
I think you have to know somebody really rich, who wants someone to broadcast propaganda on the discussions.
Posted by evilbusheviks at 4:51 AM : Mar 29, 2009
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May I recommend Dinesh D'Souza's book "What's so Great About Christianity?". See chapter 19 "A License to Kill: Atheism and the Mass Murders of History" for a scholarly treatment of atheism's role in world history over the past 100 years. I quote: Five hundred years after the Inquisition, we are still talking about it, but less than two decades after the collapse of "godless Communism," there is an eerie silence about the mass graves of the Soviet Gulag. Why the absence of accountability? Does atheism mean never having to say you are sorry?
Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on.
Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people. Focusing only on the big three - Stalin, Hitler, and Mao - we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.
Religion-inspired killing simply cannot compete with the murders perpetrated by atheist regimes. Atheist violence surpasses religious violence by staggering proportions. Taken together, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the witch burnings killed approximately 200,000 people. Adjusting for the increase in population, that's the equivalent of one million deaths today. Even so, these deaths caused by Christian rulers over a five-hundred year period amount to only 1 percent of the deaths caused by Stalin, Hitler, and Mao in the space of a few decades.