This is going to be short and sweet.
In his "speech" yesterday, Tricky DICK Cheney asserted that our military officers don't know what their talking about.
From the DICK:
From the beginning of the program, there was only one focused and all- important purpose: We sought -- and we, in fact, obtained -- specific information on terrorist plans.
Ummmmm, DICK? Those who were there disagree.
From the Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody report from the Senate Committee on Armed Services Report released last month (large PDF!), our officers disagree:
At the time, there was a view by some at GTMO that interrogation operations had not yielded the anticipated intelligence, MAJ Burney testified to the Army IG regarding interrogations:
"[T]his is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link .. , there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce
more immediate resuIts."
(emphasis mine)
So as Lawrence Wilkerson said, we were torturing to justify the war.
And just who is this MAJ Burney? He's not just some schmuck speculating about what he thinks may have happened. He's Major Paul Burney, the Army psychiatrist for the Army's 85th Medical Detachment's Combat Stress Control Team who was deployed to Guantanamo Bay in June, 2002.
Upon arrival, three members of the team psychiatrist Major Paul Burney, psychologist [redacted], and a psychiatric technician were informed that MG Michael Dunlavey, the Commander of JTF-170, had assigned them to support interrogation operations as part of a newly created Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) at the JTF. This assignment came as a surprise to MAl Burney and [redacted] because, when they were deployed, the two understood that their mission would be to care for U.S. soldiers dealing with deployment-related stress In a written statement provided to the Committee, MAJ Burney described the assignment:
"Three of us; [redacted] [the enlisted psychiatric technician], and I, were hijacked and immediately in processed into Joint Task Force 170, the military intelligence command on the island. It turns out we were assigned to the interrogation element because Joint Task Force 170 had authorizations for a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a psychiatric technician on its duty roster but nobody had been deployed to fill these positions. Nobody really knew what we were supposed to do for the unit, but at least the duty roster had its positions filled."
The report goes on to say:
Prior to their arrival at GTMO, neither MAJ Burney nor [redacted] had any training to support interrogations and there was no standard operating procedure in place for the team at GTMO. MAJ Burney told the Committee that the team was "very aware ofhow little we knew about the whole spectrum of detention and interrogation, we decided we needed help."
Nice operation you got there, DICK. Throwing untrained personnel into your little clusterfuck and then lying about their purpose. Thanks for the snow job speech yesterday. It's nice to know that your pride and personal ambition are more important than the truth.