I devoted a recent post to Jane Mayer's new book with the long, descriptive subtitle: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. Now comes Ron Suskind to report, in his new book, that the Bush White House directed the CIA to forge a document in order to boost its case for war. Revelations of duplicity, lawlessness, and incompetence among the Bushies continue apace. Thomas Powers, author of the forthcoming The Military Error: Baghdad and Beyond in America's War of Choice, recently wrote, poignantly but without media fanfare, of the education of one Alex Rossmiller, an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency's Office of Iraq Analysis. In his memoir Still Broken, Rossmiller describes a scene he witnessed in Iraq. Our forces were "processing" prisoners captured during an operation. A US Army officer explained the drill, the last step of which was shipping them all off to "Abu G." Powers takes up a summary of Rossmiller's account:
Off to Abu Ghraib prison? At that point Rossmiller began to understand that all his care as an intelligence analyst to separate the good guys from the bad guys was academic. The debrief was a barrage of shouted accusations. What Rossmiller saw among the detainees was confusion, fear, despair, anger, humiliation, and tears. It gradually became apparent that one of the detainees, shouted at repeatedly, was a retarded deaf mute. His brothers tried to explain this but were loudly accused of being insurgents. . . . It was a simple question of paperwork. Two affidavits were enough to put a detainee in prison--one saying he was armed, a second saying he resisted detention. "They get an initial three-month stay," the [Army officer] explained, "and the debriefers there figure out what happens after that." Rossmiller got the point. There were no good guys. "Anybody who's picked up gets sent to prison."
We are sometimes told by Republicans that government is not up to performing the simplest tasks, but they must not actually believe it. Else they wouldn't have been cheering on Team Bush as it undertook a war of choice in the heart of the Middle East.
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