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George W. Bush Admits Torture, Says He Would 'Do It Again'
Former US president says Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded by US and he would do it again 'to save lives'
George Bush admitted yesterday that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded by the US, and said he would do it again "to save lives".
Don't worry, he prayed on it. In an era of zero accountability it is of little surprise that the former President would come out and admit his role in the torture of suspected criminals. In his speech, Bush also defended the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. He said ousting Saddam Hussein "was the right thing to do and the world is a better place without him". Making the world a 'better place', we are asked to believe, was Bush's great legacy.
"Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," the former president told a business audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "I'd do it again to save lives."
Waterboarding is a simulated drowning technique that the Obama administration has said is torture. Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and is the most senior al-Qaida operative in US custody.
In his speech, Bush also defended the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. He said ousting Saddam Hussein "was the right thing to do and the world is a better place without him".
But he said he was not tempted to criticise Barack Obama. "You are not going to see me in the public square criticising the president."
In February he said he was "trying to regain a sense of anonymity. I didn't like it when a certain former president made my life miserable." This was said to be a reference to Jimmy Carter, president from 1976 to 1980.
Bush also talked about the role of religion in his life. "I prayed a lot. I really did. I prayed before every major speech. I prayed before debates. It was a very important experience."
And he talked about the morning of 9/11, describing how he had learned that first one, then two planes had hit the World Trade Centre in New York. The third plane, which hit the Pentagon near Washington DC, was "a declaration of war on our country", he said.
Bush's memoir Decision Points will be published in November.
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161 Comments so far
Show AllProtecting a War Criminal
Bush the Lesser and his cronies don't like to discuss their commission of serious war crimes as they violated Anti-torture Laws and treaties by ordering and creating a torture regime...
It's despicable that Obama didn't prosecute the Bush Admin., at the time Obama was waffling on enforcing our anti-torture laws (which has become an example of his "pragmatism") people said you must prosecute and w/ Bush's repeated arrogance and sense of elitist impunity we're seeing why it's always bad to let war criminals escape accountability for their actions, policies, and orders...b/c they'd do it (commit torture which is illegal, ineffective, and a war crime) all again.
Dubya doesn't need to tell us that he is not going to criticize Obama.
Why would Dubya want to criticize a successor who is institutionalizing the crimes Dubya pioneered ?
Dubya pioneered nothing, he's not that bright. American Presidents have been committing the exact same crimes since Truman, heck, since Washington.
Dubya doesn't want to criticize 0bama because 0bama has agreed to not prosecute him. He can boast of his crimes to this extent because 0bama has so thoroughly incriminated himself that he could not safely hang D without setting a precedent for himself.
A confessed war criminal, speaking openly about his crimes.
His god influenced him to torture and kill.
Is this your god?
I think the world would be a better place without all the Bushs.
I wonder what the gods think.
The gods would approve. There has never been a god who didn't have a thirst for human blood.
There has never been a god who didn't have a thirst for human blood.
Concise, precise, and the rabbis, priests and imams round up the sheep for the slaughter.
Think of all the heads that have been lopped off in religious wars over the centuries.
When a sitting president ignores our anti-torture laws by refusing to prosecute those who in a previous administration tortured, the former is complicit in the latter administrations crimes. So Obama, too, is a torturer. And when Americans eventually rise up - and they will at some point ... when it's way too late - the US government, if they deem it "necessary in order to save lives," will torture us as well.
Torture isn't used in order to save lives. They use it to terrorize a population into submission. Remember the leaked photos from the torture prisons? This was deliberately to show the resistance what is waiting for them.
Obama, our law professor, constitutional scholar is a criminal. Can we get our minds wrapped around that? He isn't naive, he knows exactly what this means.
University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle is preparing a complaint against Obama to be submitted to the ICC International Criminal Court. A few months ago he submitted one against Bush and his cohorts.
Agreed. I'm no legal scholar, but think the lawyers who justified it are complicit as well.
The war on drugs was declared while government agents were dealing drugs.
The war on poverty was declared while crushing people's livelihoods.
The war on terrorism is to terrorize everyone.
The fact that our leaders try to keep us confused does not mean that they themselves are confused. They know what they are doing.-----George Lakoff
Absolutely. Everything is going according to plan.
Don't ever buy into the "oops, my bad" crappola.
All pretty much brought to you by the Bush Crime Family and their minions. GHW, GW and the big Dick should all be prosecuted and jailed. Then, perhaps a little waterboarding would be useful to uncover all of their shenanigans...!!
"Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," the former president told a business audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "I'd do it again to save lives."
Kind of like the ticking time bomb scenario. The carefully framed story where you know you have the right bad guy, and you know he knows bad things are about to happen to good people, and all you have to do is torture the info out of him.
Hey how about a more realistic scenario. You have some intelligence that a WMD is hidden in a major American city that is going to go off in the next 24 to 48 hours. You grab a guy that you THINK may be involved, so you torture the crap out of him until he tells you what you want to hear. Unfortunately you got the wrong person, and he told you a bunch of B/S crap, just to get you to stop torturing him. Not a word of it is true, and .gov goes on a wild goose chase in the wrong city, and the WMD goes off in a completely different city.
I wonder why nobody ever uses that scenario?
You can laugh at our enhanced interrogation techniques if you want, but they get to the truth and provide reliable information for solving crimes. Not only did KSM admit to planning 911, but he also confessed to planning the assassinations of Archduke Ferdinand and Abraham Lincoln, as well as supplying the daggers that killed Caesar.
Thank you W.
Torture is not used so much to gain information as it is to terrorize people into submission.
It's the main reason they organized the leaks. "Watch your step Iraqis! Take a look at what's in store for you and your children if you resist!"
The US is a terrorist nation, along with Israel. Remember what the perfectly horrible Thomas Friedman essentially said on the pages of the New York Times: It's ok to kill massive numbers of civilians if it teaches their leaders a lesson. Around the same time, Paul Krugman was censored by the same paper for using the term "lies" when referring to GW Bush. He was forced to take out that wording.
You can promote war crimes on the pages of the NY Times but you can't tell the truth, you have to evade it or lie.
Although I don't agree with every thing Paul Krugman says, (especially that whole endless economic growth thing), I like him, and think his heart is overall in the right place.
Friedman on the other hand has me diving for the TV remote so I can quickly change the channel whenever I see that self righteous puss on the boob tube. I just cant stand that man. If he thinks war is such a great thing give him a gun and send him over there to experience it first hand.
Nonsense.
The *world* will never forget, or forgive, George W. Bush.
His name will live in eternal infamy along with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Piochet and Netanyahu.
If George Bush is remembered, it will be as a clown. Now Cheney, on the other hand, is a different matter.
The Palin presidency won't be a problem. She will quit after a year to make money on the lecture circuit. The real question is what will her vice-president, Michelle Bachmann, do when she moves into the White House?
they'll probably end up being OUTED as Lesbians ......
*yawn*
More trollery from GLR88.
Palin's pick for VP will be crucial because she will step down after two years.
This is true nonsense and the dream of Women's liberation.
Left, right, republican, democrat. It doesn't matter any more. Both parties are primarily there to serve the rich and it's empire. The styles of the two parties are somewhat different but the results are the same, transfer wealth from the poor to the rich and destroy the planet for the sake of the empire.
Hardly. Anyone with half a grasp of reality recognizes that the change from the Dick&Bush to the Obomber was nothing more than a cosmetic makeover - a new mask for the same regime, choreographed by the same owners/rulers. The Obomber has just been a bit more efficient, going from hero to lame duck in under 18 months. Looks like he wants out worse than Bush did in his second term. Makes you wonder what kind of toads the oligarchs are grooming for 2012.
I notice that, while everyone mentions Cheney when they write about Bush, no one ever mentions Biden when complaining about Obama.
We've gone from "the most powerful" Vice President in US history to the most ignominious.
q
Biden's a traditional VP, performing ceremonial duties, etc. He's done little, if any, serious damage and manages to make the occasional faux pas appear amusing. Therefore he is largely ignored - which is probably why he smiles a lot. (If I were a politician, that's the job I'd covet... but only with God's assurance that the President would survive our term.)
We've gone from "the most powerful" Vice President in US history to the most ignominious.
Ignominious? get a dictionary. cheney was the most ignominious. biden is just insignificant.
INVESTIGATE! PROSECUTE!
It amazes me that religious zealots like W. Bush never seem to see the hypocrisy in their beliefs in prayer and worshiping Jaysus and then killing and torturing? Of course, the Christians have been doing those things for the past 2,000 years, so why stop now?
Jill, what a sweet and succinct little post. I like your small g "god" and your capital F "Family" ...
Luckily, no 'god' gave the faux-religious elite their wealth and power; it's due entirely to asocial philosophies and behaviors. It would be more accurate to guess that their status derives from devil worship. Karma takes a while, but we could say 'the people giveth and the people taketh away' once we get sufficiently sick of the status quo and understand what's really going on.
Hillary Clinton is also associated with "The Family".
Something that is not talked about much on any media source is that Jesus was a liberal or a humanist. He didn't do much praying for he talked to God and God talked to him. His family thought that he was crazy and when he would not say what they wanted him to say to save his life, he proved it. Jesus had no choice, because God put him up against the bankers and the Jewish ruling elite. He had to die for their sins ~ the same sins that stand in America's way to true freedom today!
Dear Jill
Thanks for the "Family" revelation. I was wondering what was up with some elite X'ian bozos I've come across. I'll look into the author you mention.
I can not forget the response of Mahatma Gandhi to an american reporter - back when the USA was the perceived and self-described "bastion of freedom and justice"...just after the world war 2 and india had just finished kicking the british empire out ...so Mahatma of course was one of the world's most respected figures.
the reporter (i think from Time Magazine , which was then the US Empire's "paper of note" propaganda machine of Henry Luce who believed it the destiny of the USA to become the world's ruler and used his Time Magazine expressly for that purpose) -
asked Mahatma , expecting perhaps glowing remarks about the USA:
"MISTER GANDHI -- what do you LIKE about America?"
Gandhi: "I do not like your Christians -- they are so ......UNchristlike".
"the whole world knows Jesus taught kindness , especially towards the weak....except Christians".
I think no nation on earth proclaims itself as "CHRISTIAN" with greater fervor and insistence than the USA --
BUT USES it to promote CRUELTY .
imagine what Jesus Christ would say in the way America "christians" behave or tolerate and support things that are , ultimately , in their consequences -- CRUEL...whether it's the extermination of Native Indians, the enslavement and dehumanizing of Africans and other coloreds..the "criminalizing" of "illegals" , many of whom are the descendants of people whose land the "white" americans merely stole ...the Nuclear Armament hypocrisy..the Empire, the Capitalism as "virtue" ...the "slow genocides" of its policies and bombings and CIA, NSA, State Department.
its "chamber of Commerce" disaster economics....etc. etc. etc. etc.
imagine what Jesus Christ would say or remind American "christians"...........and yet what americans would RESPOND with if Jesus came and REMINDED them again...for example about "illegals" ...or even "terrorists" being waterboarded and tortured...or peasants in hinterland suffering as a result of AMERICAN policies abroad...:
"WHAT YOU DO TO THESE, the LEAST of my children...you do unto ME".
oh = boy -- american "christians" would probably shout "CRUCIFY HIM" -- TORTURE HIM -- he's a "Terrorist". a COMMIE, a "left winger" ..."anti american" .........
and i would NOT put it past americans , even in the majority , to DO EXACTLY that - if it was actually jesus christ himself come back to remind them ....
Perhaps, Teddy, that is way he will NEVER be coming back! Although, I suspect that even if he did historically exist, he would have arrived with a one way ticket anyway.
I also object to the title of the Bush book, "Decisions Points."
I favor, "MY PET GLOAT: Decision POINT.
A one page document for easy reading.
Chapter One: "The Presidency"
I let Cheney do it.
Bush knows he is protected from prosecution.
So of course he brags about committing Crimes Against HUmanity.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Here's a far better article on this subject than the Guardian/UK piece:
A PLAGUE UPON THE WORLD: THE USA IS A FAILED STATE
Interview with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19458
Thanks for the link to an excellent article. "When the dollar fails..." what will actually happen? What will be the reality of a failed US currency? Any thoughts on that?
long term poverty
the buck will be past.
The most telling aspect of this article is the source, Dr. Roberts.
assorted lowlights:
Laws are arbitrary, nonexistent to the average citizen.
The citizens are brainwashed, brain dead and/or blind, deaf and mute.
The "richest" nation has been destroyed by debt.
War is a losing proposition, indifference kills.
All life giving resources are controlled and abused.
It is going to get worse.
related to other current news discussions;
"... Americans are above all others, except, of course, Israelis."
What does Baby Bush have to critisize Obomber for?
Baby Bush put the USA citizens on the Scaffold and Obomber is delivering the Coup d' etat.
There's a City in Illinois missing it's Mobster.
Good for, Sweaters and Solar Panels, Jimmy!
Let us not forget the "other" war criminals: Mr. Bush and Ms. Condoleeza Rice, Mr. Dick Cheney, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Powell, Mr. Karl Rove and Mr. Paul Wolfowitz, and their minions, I Lewis Libby, Ari Fleischer, John Ashcroft, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad, Douglas Feith and James Woolsey, and Bill Pryor.
These are horrible human beings, they are cut from the same cloth as the terrorists we call our enemies. Their ideologies and methods are mirror images of one another which include, religious intolerance, lies, propaganda, war, and torture.
James E. Mitchell, a retired clinical psychologist for the Air Force, had studied al-Qaeda resistance techniques.
"The thing that will make him talk," the participant recalled Mitchell saying, "is fear."
Now, as the Senate intelligence committee examines the CIA's interrogation program, investigators are focusing in part on Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen, former CIA contractors who helped design and oversee Abu Zubaida's interrogation.
Mitchell had retired from the Air Force before the Sept. 11 attacks and won several government contracts, including one from the CIA to study ways to assess people who volunteered information to the agency. While still in the military training program known as SERE -- for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape -- he and his colleagues called themselves "Masters of the Mind [Expletive],"
The CIA dispatched FBI agents Ali Soufan and Steve Gaudin for an initial look. The two men arrived a few hours before the wounded man was transferred to a hastily assembled CIA interrogation facility near one of Bangkok's airports.
Details of their experience and that of the CIA officials who followed them to Thailand with Mitchell. . . Mitchell boarded a CIA plane for Bangkok with R. Scott Shumate, a CIA psychologist. . .Shumate, the CIA psychologist, who voiced regret that he had played a role in recommending Mitchell to the agency.
At the secret prison, dissent over Mitchell's methods peaked. First Shumate left, followed by Soufan. At the site, Shumate had expressed concerns about sleep deprivation. . . Abu Zubaida was waterboarded 83 times over four or five days, and Mitchell and Jessen concluded that the prisoner was broken. . . CIA officials at the Counterterrorist Center were not convinced.
"Headquarters was sending daily harangues, cables, e-mails insisting that waterboarding continue for 30 days because another attack was believed to be imminent," the former official said. "Headquarters said it would be on the team's back if an attack happened. They said to the interrogation team, 'You've lost your spine.' "
Mitchell and Jessen now found themselves in the same position as Soufan, Shumate and others.
Let us not forget. Any of these people next door neighbors? Any teach your sons or daughters? Do any attend the Low Teas now given all over America? Pray over it and ask for the Gift of Discernment.
I still don't understand why in the hell these people have not been indicted.
Obama didn't want to 'look back'. Only forward.
So now he is looking into the biggest environmental disaster in our history.
No one gets a free pass, karmically speaking.
It's worse than that.
It's the total destruction of the nation with the planet soon to follow.
Karmically speaking, it includes you and me.