We are all familiar with Bush's recent speeches trying to get his party's collective ass out of a sling. But his latest one, a
defense of torture, is, based on lies. THe speech would make
Goebbels Disney/ABC Tom Clancy proud.
In the speech, Bush shows off how we learned so much information by torturing a guy named Abu Zubaydah. Too bad that's not actually true. Spencer Ackerman has the smackdown.
Ackerman first takes on Bush's bullshit claim that Zubaydah resisted standard interrogation before we we went all Abu Gonzalez on his ass:
First, according to Ron Suskind, Abu Zubaydah didn't clam up because he was "trained to resist interrogation," but because he has the mental capacity of a retarded child.
Then, he does simple research to expose the rest of Bush's fake story, or should I say "composite" description of what happpened:
Second, the idea that Abu Zubaydah's interrogation tipped off the U.S. to the existence of Ramzi bin Al Shibh is just an outright lie. A Nexis search for "Ramzi Binalshibh" between September 11, 2001 and March 1, 2002--the U.S. captured Abu Zubaydah in March 2002--turns up 26 hits for The Washington Post alone. Everyone involved in counterterrorism knew who bin Al Shibh was. Now-retired FBI Al Qaeda hunter Dennis Lormel told Congress who Ramzi bin Al Shibh was in February 2002. Abu Zubaydah getting waterboarded and spouting bin Al Shibh's name did not tell us anything we did not already know.
And I could not agree more with this assessment:
Of course, most Americans don't have access to Nexis. And most Americans don't remember--and can't be expected to remember--newspaper coverage of Al Qaeda for a seven-month stretch between the attacks and Abu Zubaydah's capture. Bush is exploiting that ignorance to tell the American people an outright lie in order to convince them that we need to torture people. As Bush once said in another context, if this is not evil, then evil has no meaning.
I thought that after the whole "16 words" incident (you know, lying in the state of the union about Saddam seeking nuclear material in Niger) and the bullshit aluminum tubes and the 45 minute mushroom cloud that the Administration was going to at least tone down the lying to the American people. I am nostalgic for the good old days when the Presidential lies concerned White House blowjobs and not invasions and torture.