Col. Wilkerson's article yesterday at The Washington Note, Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay is troubling to me, and causes me to question whether his seeming 'truth-telling' following his departure, along with Gen. Powell, from the State Department is real, or merely serving the purpose of a limited hangout for the Cheney regime.
Col. Wilkerson flogs the false incompetence meme throughout the piece, then closes with fearmongering, warning us that our "entire future as a free people is in jeopardy'" and "[h]ow we deal with the future attacks of [al-Qa'ida] and its cohorts could well seal our fate, for good or bad."
Rather than reveal what he knows, he asks questions from within the false frame of the previous eight years, including propelling outright propaganda that has already been debunked. If my interpretation of this piece is correct, and I'd like the kommunity's input, maybe Col. Wilkerson should have his credibility questioned.
Col. Wilkerson first came forward after his retirement from government service in a lecture sponsored by the New America Foundation in October 2005. At the time it seemed he would be a truth teller. [A summary of the speech used to be posted at this link, which now redirects to a different article from 2006. Amy Goodman interviews Col. Wilkerson about the speech and his revelations here.]
In yesterday's piece he once again flogs the false 'incompetence' meme to explain why innocents were rounded up 'on the battlefield' and trundled into the torture gulag, and eventually to GTMO, without anyone competent enough to determine their 'intelligence value' beforehand. This is disingenuous. Why won't anyone other than smintheus and a few other bloggers admit that the intent was to create the torture gulag, to indoctrinate our intelligence and military into the torture regime? And to manufacture false 'intelligence' by torturing confessions to monstrous fantasies from the minds of the Cheney/PNAC regime, as pretext for carrying out their plan, as outlined in 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' which, itself, is a euphemism for the plundering of Asia's energy deposits?
He touches on the intent of rounding up masses of hapless innocents as 'intelligence assets', but backs off of further analysis of the reasoning for doing so with his 'Fourth Myth':
"The fourth unknown is the ad hoc intelligence philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.
"Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot."
In the next sentence he returns to the myth of 'it's the incompetence' with:
"Another unknown, a part of the fabric of the foregoing four, was the sheer incompetence involved in cataloging and maintaining the pertinent factors surrounding the detainees that might be relevant in any eventual legal proceedings, whether in an established court system or even in a kangaroo court that pretended to at least a few of the essentials, such as evidence."
Well...why bother to keep careful records when you know in advance that your real motivation is to simply create a torture regime for domination of the populations in the way of 'your' oil; the local ethos is irrelevant to the pursuit of your plans; you have superior air power and Special Operations commandos? Does anyone really think that Cheney or Rumsfeld gave a darn about the local culture? When they could buy cooperation on an ad hoc basis with tax dollars? (the Anbar Awakening a case in point), or just bomb them to smithereens?
Why is Col. Wilkerson astounded by the fact that
"...[no] intelligence of significance was gained from any of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay other than from the handful of undisputed ring leaders and their companions, clearly no more than a dozen or two of the detainees, and even their alleged contribution of hard, actionable intelligence is intensely disputed in the relevant communities such as intelligence and law enforcement."
Doesn't Col. Wilkerson already know that the entire torture regime was manufactured, and the victims mere pawns in the PNAC/Cheney administration policy of war for oil? It was a stage set, a sadistic psy-op justification for their war for oil, masquerading as a 'War on Terror', and serving to brutalize our culture as well.
It takes a setting-aside of one's 'normal' and 'rational' analytical skills, and instead, delving into the psychology of the neocon mind to understand and make sense of acts and policy that, to us, seem mere bumbling incompetence, but which are really logical means to their end of global domination of energy, by a group of sadistic, ruthless psychopaths, for whom human suffering is irrelevant, and not even collateral damage, because it is part of the plan. John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience helps explain this mindset.
Why does Col. Wilkerson repeat the falsehood that "at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo (sic) during the Bush administration...have gone back into the business of being terrorists." This has already been debunked by Denbeaux, et. al's The Meaning of "Battlefield" [pdf], which concludes:
"Thus, the data provided by the Department of Defense indicates that every public statement made by Department of Defense officials regarding the number of detainees who have been released and thereafter killed or re-captured on the battlefield was false."
Why does Col. Wilkerson twist his own logic to say:
"Or was this a revelation that men kept in detention such as those at GITMO--even innocent men--would become terrorists if released because of the harsh treatment meted out to them at GITMO? Seven years in jail as an innocent man might do that for me."
Really? You might become a terrorist, Col. Wilkerson? Why write this when the research debunking the claim has already been done? Or are you trying to keep the fear of terrorists at the top of the mind? I'd hate to think you are preparing us for the third successive terrorist attack to occur in the first year of a new president.
Why do you repeat the agitprop about "reading the rights to an Al Qaeda [sic] terrorist"? I really wonder what your purpose is in this piece. The point of Cheney's propaganda is to conflate his actions with national security or protecting the US, which couldn't be further from reality. None of Cheney's actions were intended to 'protect the US', much less defend the Constitution. Col. Wilkerson, you fall into the trap of Cheney's frame...again. Or is it your intention to continue this frame?
Why, Col. Wilkerson do you agree with Cheney that "Protecting the country's security is a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business. These are evil people and we are not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek."? I suggest you read Juan Cole's posts this week over at TPMCafé Book Club about his new book Engaging the Muslim World, wherein Dr. Cole suggests talking, you know, diplomacy, that thing the State Department is supposed to do.
OK. Thank you Col. Wilkerson, for this next sentence: "Cheney and his like are the evil people and we certainly are not going to prevail in the struggle with radical religion if we listen to people such as he." Yes, you finally 'got it'. But why did you 'propel the propaganda' beforehand? Are we supposed to merely look backward, blaming Cheney and his like, and not notice that many of his minions are still salted throughout the executive branch, pushing back? Surely you must know a lot about these apparatchiks. Please tell us about them, instead of trying to divert our attention from the task at hand: weeding them out and moving forward with a more constructive policy.
Next, you ask whether we'll ever learn the truth about GTMO. Why don't you help us out by telling us what you really know, and what you know about those still at the helm at DoD, and about the Obama advisors who have the GTMO portfolio? Why not tell us about the Bush holdovers, and others on the neocon fringe, who are delaying progress towards closing GTMO and changing US policy?
Why bother ending with more fearmongering?:
"In fact, on such positive developments may ultimately rest our entire future as a free people. For there shall inevitably be future terrorist attacks. Al-Qa'ida has been hurt, badly, largely by our military actions in Afghanistan and our careful and devastating moves to stymie its financial support networks." [emphasis added]
This sounds like Cheney agitprop. What 'positive developments' did you mean to reference? I didn't notice you mentioning any. You were just asking whether the Obama administration would "have the courage to follow through on its campaign promises." Well, what do you think, based on your observations so far? You didn't really say. It almost sounds like you don't expect any change in direction.
Here you go again:
"How we deal with the future attacks of this organization and its cohorts could well seal our fate, for good or bad. Osama bin Laden and his brain trust, Aman al-Zawahiri, are counting on us to produce the bad. With people such as Cheney assisting them, they are far more likely to succeed." [emphasis added]
Thanks a bunch, Col. Wilkerson. This is so........not reassuring. Are you implying that Cheney, whether through private channels, or via 'burrowers' still lurking within government, is still 'assisting' al-Qa'ida? Why not tell us? What's your point. Really?