The banality of evil: Torture for money

Yesterday I went to a presentation at Harvard Law school called "The Bush administration torture policy: Come hear the evidence."  Amongst others, British ambassador Craig Murray and Retired General Karpinski spoke.

They painted a vivid picture not of corruption, but of plain evil in the Bush administration: torture of the worst kind in exchange not for information but for disinformation.

And torture for money.

What follows is taken from the (sometimes sparse) notes I took at the presentation, but it is supplemented with links when they are easy to find.

Uzbekistan has a Stalinist government that regularly imprisons Christians and still has forms of slavery: not the expected ally for  Republicans.  At least not unless it has oil..., which it does.  Enron opened an office there in the late 90s, prompting the following letter from Ken Lay to then Governor Bush:

In a Apr. 3, 1997 "Dear George" letter, Lay reminded Bush he would be meeting with Uzbekistan's Ambassador Sadyq Safaev.

"Enron has established an office in Tashkent and we are negotiating a $2 billion joint venture with Neftegas of Uzbekistan and Gazprom of Russian to develop Uzbekistan's natural gas and transport it to markets in Europe, Kazakhstan and Turkey," Lay wrote. "I know you and Ambassador Safaev will have a productive meeting which will result in friendship between Texas and Uzbekistan."

Under President Bush, Uzbekistan received more than $500 million worth of US "humanitarian" aid, over $200 million of which went to the government in some way.  This was something like 10 times more than we gave to West Africa during that time.  Why?  Well because that's how you turn taxpayer dollars into Enron dollars.  The real question is "how?"  How does the US government justify giving a really bad country with a tiny population so much money???  We'll find out in a minute.

The CIA established a major intelligence station in Uzbekistan, and Murray was privy to all the US intelligence from the area (he says that the US and Britain share all of their intelligence).  But much of the intel he was seeing was blatantly false.  People he knew were not linked to Al Quaeda (e.g. a Jehovah's witness peace-activist he knew of) were being accused of such a link.  

Now Uzbekistan is, according to Murray, possibly the worst country in the world for torture: "they torture on an industrial scale."  He told us of pictures he saw of a person who had his fingernails pulled out, was severely beaten around the eyes, and died from being immersed up to his chest in boiling water .  I almost started crying right there in the auditorium.

People will say anything under torture.  They will tell the truth, they will tell lies, they will implicate everyone; they will literally tell you they are Mickey Mouse if you tell them to, because their mind isn't functioning well enough to realize that it's a trick question.  Any semblence of truth is so lost in the mountains of falsities that the intelligence is literally unusable.  That has been shown over and over by independent commissions on the matter.

So why did we use intelligence obtained from torture if it doesn't work?  The CIA isn't stupid, they know that such information is useless. Murray gave a two-pronged reason.

The US used the intelligence that Uzbekistan was providing them in order to justify its policies and actions in the war on terror (we knew that already).  What I hadn't heard before was this.  The US used the intelligence to paint a false picture of Uzbekistan as "a major ally in the war on terror," and in turn used the fact that they were such an important ally as an excuse to pay them over $500 million dollars of taxpayer money (some sources say almost $1 billion).  

To reiterate, the millions of dollars were not in exchange for their help in the war on terror -- the torture-obtained intelligence they gave us was useless, everyone knew that.  The whole point is this: The Bush administration gave this money to Uzbekistan in exchange for lucrative oil contracts for Bush's friends and contributors.  People in Texas have literally become billionaires because of contracts with Uzbekistan, since 2001.  

Ambassador Murray called this "the banality of evil."  It is truly sickening.  It is truly inhuman.

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All of these claims and the sources and justifications for them are in Murray's book, "Murder in Samarkind", which has not been published because the UK government has prohibited it (for now...).  But you can also see a lot of this on his website.

I might write a little about what Karpinski said sometime soon.

I encourage everyone to see this panel and ask them your questions on the above amazing and almost inconceivable claims.  Here's the tour schedule.  It has been going on for a while, but it is coming soon to the SF Bay Area (and Stanford), Chicago, LA, and Seattle.

Please recommend this diary if this information is new to you.