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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by William Pfaff
Little mainstream comment seems to have appeared on the latest revelations of incompetence and sadistic fantasy that have been published this week about the ways in which the American nation lost its honor and international reputation because of the Bush administration's infatuation with torture.
Or with, as Vice President Richard Cheney has put it, "the dark side": its eight-year excursion into what commonly is understood to be criminal international behavior, which the former vice president continues to defend with relish and conviction.
The revelations concern the two men who reportedly created the torture techniques that the CIA and U.S. military have been using on prisoners since early in the "war on terror."
According to The
The program, housed at an
Most anyone who has been in military service since the Korean War has been given a taste of this, but it was an
Jessen had been a farm boy who had earned a psychology doctorate at
The other of the two successive head psychologists at the course was Jim Mitchell, a poor boy from Florida who joined the
When 2001 came, the two friends saw their opportunity, convincing the government that they were experts on torture. Neither knew much, if anything, about al-Qaida, the intelligence world, Islam, foreign languages or foreign countries.
They simply reversed what they had been teaching, and taught the torture rather than the resistance. According to the Times, they then "made millions selling interrogation and training services to the CIA."
Now there is an aspect to this which so far as I know has never been mentioned in connection with the U.S. torture program.
"Brainwashing" is a myth.
The whole thing came from one sensational book, and the press and public hysteria built up from the fact that some American prisoners in Korea gave "confessions" of war crimes to enemy propaganda, presumably to escape routine brutality or to get privileged treatment.
The
One more thing must be added to illuminate the atmosphere in which this could have happened in the United States.
The president, Jacques Chirac, supposedly wanted a clarification of the significance of the figures of Gog and Magog in Biblical prophecy. He was calling Lausanne because he didn't want his query to be leaked to the press in France.
The theologian explained to him that the two are obscure figures who appear in the Book of Genesis, and again in Ezekiel, in connection with a prophesy of a great war, desired by God, to cleanse the world of His enemies before the arrival of the world's Last Days, when a New Age would follow.
Chirac reportedly said he was calling because he was distressed that President George Bush had twice telephoned him to inform France's president that this war was beginning, and urging France to join the United States in fulfilling the divine prophesy. As is well known, France did not do so.
This appears in a new book of interviews by a respected French journalist and friend of Chirac, Jean-Claude Maurice, provocatively called "If You Quote Me, I'll Deny It." The report by Maurice has not been confirmed by the former French president. But it has not been denied.
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