The Bush legacy:
When Muhammad Saad Iqbal arrived home here in August after more than six years in American custody, including five at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.
In November, a Pakistani surgeon operated on his ear, physical therapists were working on lower back problems and a psychiatrist was trying to wean him off the drugs he carried around in a white, plastic shopping bag.
The maladies, said Mr. Iqbal, 31, a professional reader of the Koran, are the result of a gantlet of torture, imprisonment and interrogation for which his Washington lawyer plans to sue the United States government.
***Mr. Iqbal was never convicted of any crime, or even charged with one. He was quietly released from Guantánamo with a routine explanation that he was no longer considered an enemy combatant, part of an effort by the Bush administration to reduce the prison’s population.
***Mr. Iqbal said he had been beaten, tightly shackled, covered with a hood and given drugs, subjected to electric shocks and, because he denied knowing Mr. bin Laden, deprived of sleep for six months. “They make me blind and stand up for whole days,” he said in halting English, meaning that he had been covered with a hood or blindfolded.
The Pentagon and the C.I.A. have a policy of not talking about the detainees, but a C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said, “The agency’s terrorist detention program has used lawful means of interrogation, reviewed and approved by the Department of Justice and briefed to the Congress.
“This individual, from what I have heard of his account, appears to be describing something utterly different,” Mr. Gimigliano added. “I have no idea what he’s talking about. The United States does not conduct or condone torture.”
You really have to read the entire story. Apparently his crime was to be in a group where someone may have uttered the phrase “I know how to make a shoe bomb,” and for that he was imprisoned in Gitmo, shuttled around the world and tortured at out behest, and labeled the worst of the worst by Donald Rumsfeld.
And the funniest thing about all of this is that one of the worst terrorist attacks on this country did not happen with a shoe bomb, but a fertilizer bomb. And you know who actively trains people how to make fertilizer bombs?
The US Army. It was part of my training at Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, some 15 years ago.
We have lost our damned minds.
lilly Von Schtupp
This is just the beginning. We will be hearing more of these stories once Bush is out of office. I can’t imagine the blowback that will come from all this.
linda
not our minds — our souls, our values, our national legacy.
but it’s just fratboy funhouse games….
Napoleon
That makes me so proud to be an American. I think I will go out and slap another "Support the Troops" magnetic ribbon on my SUV and have a Red State Strike Force t-shirt made for me at my local t-shirt shop.
gypsy howell
Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller would be shocked!… shocked I tell you!… to find out that things like this were happening under their watch.
We better get to the bottom of this by appointing one of the perpetrators to head the CIA, instead of that Panetta guy.
Tattoosydney
So the US government arrested people for no reason, fucked them up with torture, and then wants to simply dump them back in the countries they came from. What a surprise.
How can anyone imagine that there will be any unfortunate consequences from simply putting these damaged (and in some cases, presumably, resentful) people back and expecting them to be able to get on with their lives, without the US providing any support, medical assistance, or even admitting that it might have done something wrong in the first place?
Even worse than those poor bastards, there are up to 60 Guantanamo detainees, who have never been charged, but whose home countries refuse to take them back, presumably because some of them are actually bad eggs but the military commission system was too fucked up to secure a conviction…
The Bush government’s solution? Have your allies take them.
Thankfully, so far, we have said no.
The Other Steve
This is a slap in the face to farmers.
Incertus
@gypsy howell: Which is why Feinstein and Rockefeller can go pound sand when it comes to their "concerns" about Panetta at CIA.
MikeJ
If you actually have a life you’re probably unaware of the long running edit wars on wikipedia on articles about "detainees". Basically the Keyboard Kommandos have tried to delete every article about detainees, and failing that to bias the articles.
It’s all pretty dull stuff actually, but I’m afraid the bad guys will win. They seem to have limitless amounts of time to spend on wikipedia trivia.
There’s an interesting thing that upsets them that I had never seen before. It’s understood that if you’re engaged in a discussion (and especially a vote) online it’s bad form to make up new personalities and have them "support" your position. That’s called using a sockpuppet. Apparently on wikipedia they get upset if you get real live people to show up and support you and call these people "meat puppets". That’s the moronic accusation that will be flung against you if you wade into those stupid waters.
kommrade reproductive vigor
And by some strange coincidence the guys writing the laws were really flexible in their definition of torture.
See above.
And it sounds like Mr. Gimigliano is some young punk who had the misfortune to answer his boss’s phone. I read his quotes and hear the pitter-patter of flop sweat.
mcd410x
Who knew a bunch of frat boys playing cops and robbers in the Oval Office could turn out so wrong?
Oh, wait, our country re-elected these asshats!
(Excellent post).
gypsy howell
I’m very curious to see how Obama navigates these particular waters. In my more optimistic moments, I am hopeful that the craven subservience and spinelessness of our Democratic congresscritters will actually work in Obama’s favor, and he’ll simply roll them, just like Bush and Cheney always rolled them. We shall see… we shall see…
Liz
Nice knowing you, John! Homeland Security should be busting down your door in 3..2..1…
Gregory
Oh…when you said "worst of the worst," I thought you meant Rumsfeld.
Napoleon
@Incertus:
I rarely make a decision on whether I think something is a good idea based on whether someone else doesn’t like it, but in this case I am making an exception. The louder those 2 scream the more I will like Panetta.
By the way, for those of you that are young or just not into the minutia of history, Panetta started his political career as a Republican before he saw the light in 1971 and switched parties. Rick Perstein has some interesting outtakes from Nixonland on Panetta
wilfred the shoe throwing Norwegian
Not quite. His real crime, without which his statements are harmless irrelevancies, is being a Muslim. The common denominator of every single man and woman (don’t kid yourselves) who has been subjected to this sort of treatment (and extra-judicial murder) is Muslimness.
Person of Choler
Relax, folks. In a few days we will have a new president, and he will begin quickly to redress – as far as divinely possible – the wrongs done to the innocent people unlawfully incarcerated in Guantanamo.
Just wait a while and you will see the happy conclusion to this disgraceful episode in our national history.
I’m sure Balloon Juice will soon replace its anecdotes of Bush administration depravity with stories of Obama’s gentle righting of past wrongs.
wilfred the shoe throwing Norwegian
I’m sure somebody has mentioned this already elsewhere but here is Leon Panetta:
That’s the position of a human being. Feinstein’s vote was critical in appointing Mukasey, whose positions on torture match her own "Don’t ask, don’t yell".
I’ve got doubts about Obama but appointing Panetta to oversee the torturers is gutsy and decent. Good for him
Comrade Dread
That sounds a lot like enemy combatant talk, Comrade.
I’ll see you down in Cuba.
Or we’ll be bitching about the ineffectiveness or unwillingness of an Obama Administration to change things, with the obligatory qualifier that even so, he’s still better than Bush.
Shinobi
Do you think that the new president could declare the old administration enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely? Then we could find out how they REALLY define torture.
(No booze, no blackberry probably)
lovethebomb
Sure, and Rove is sitting in congressional prison because he openly ridiculed their sapeona and comtempt citation. O wait. Are you effing kidding? There will be no redress of these crimes. Obama has already demonstrated he wants everything swept away so he can persue his post partisan political construct. Dems have repeatedly shown themselves utterly unwilling to spend an ounce of capital on prosecuting Bush crimes. Don’t impeach Bush, just hope the country gets tired of him. Sure and w/out a financial collapse and Sarah Palin, we would be witnessing another 4 yrs of republican rule.
Pathetic spineless wimps. Or, and here is the likely option, there is actually only one corporate party with Dem and Rep wings who let each other alternately at bat. Obama and the Dems want nothing more than to forgive and forget anything ever happened. And sadly, so do the public.
tom p
which explains why people like John and I are still walking the streets threatening the American Way of Life just by our mere presence. (my real crime is being an aetheist, only slightly above muslims. I expect them to come kno…. wait a minute, there’s somebody at the door.)
Gus
Nice misdirection, douchebag. Bush and many of his administration belong on trial, period. Another thread will be a good place to rip Obama for his refusal to prosecute them and his insufficient zeal in redressing the Bush administration’s wrongs.
wilfred the shoe throwing Norwegian
Knock, knock:
I had forgotten about this case; who would’ve believed it anyway. I have one that says "Suck my thick Muslim cock", written in Kufic script. I think I’ll start marketing them.
TenguPhule
Fixed.
tehehehe
How ridiculous. It would be useless, as well as counterproductive, to "detain" a "Koran reader" simply because someone in his presence said, "I know how to make a shoe-bomb". If you actually believe such nonsense, then you are hopelessly naive. Do you think the CIA goes around arresting Koran readers in Mosques in foreign lands and then confines them and tortures them in GITMO? The guy was one of the authors for the Al Qaeda manual that tells Muslims how to falsify stories about detention and torture when they are captured conducting terrorist attacks and making IEDs. Less than 1,000 of the tens of thousands of "combatants" apprehended on battlefields were ever sent to GITMO. The guy did much more than read the Koran and be present when someone said, "I know how to make a shoe-bomb". More likely, Iqbal showed his students how to make a shoe-bomb, and one of them said, after the final practical exam, "Now I know how to make a shoe-bomb."
Alex
Do you think the CIA goes around arresting Koran readers in Mosques in foreign lands and then confines them and tortures them in GITMO?
Yes. Because that’s *precisely what they did*.
reality-based
John, You were in Devil’s Lake? I’m spending the winter in my ancestral ND home, about 60 miles from there. For the record, it’s varied from 5 above zero to 25 below (real temperature, not counting the wind chill) for the last three weeks or so –
But regarding using fertilizer to blow stuff up. My farming family didn’t have cattle, but those farmers and ranchers who did , across the Great Plains, have been using fertilizer to blow holes in the ground – to create stock tanks to store water for their cattle – for 50 years.
So how some Bush didn’t arrest/deport the 80% of the Great Plains population who knows how to do this?
bago
Detain != torture. FYI.
TenguPhule
Yes, and they did it anyway.
RememberNovember
The greatest atrocity will be Bush and Cheney getting away with it. Picture Bush living in his compound in Texas like Milosevic did in Bosnia. Blackwater gun-whores aplenty at the gate.