Three Failures

This story in today's NY Times typifies the utter failure of Bush administration policies in the "war on terror." In it we have the failure of rendition and the failure of torture, wrapped up in the ultimate failure of our Iraq policy.

The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties
between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided
his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

While he made some statements about Iraq and Al Qaeda when in
American custody, the officials said, it was not until after he was handed over to Egypt that he made the most specific assertions, which were later used by the Bush administration as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.

Since 9/11 the Bush administration has specifically developed these policies in response to the threat of terrorism. Rendition is supposed to provide us with the ability to gain intelligence that we could not gain ourselves without widespread use of illegal methods damaging to world opinion of us. The Bush administration accepts torture-either committed in secret by the CIA or our "allies"- because they believe it can provide us with intelligence we could not otherwise obtain using legal methods. Whether we have in fact benefitted from intelligence produced by these methods is unknown. What is known for sure is that such methods provided the administration with flimsy rationales for the war in Iraq. If we knew only that such methods provided us with useless intelligence, that would be reason enough to cease relying upon them. But these methods have proven to be worse then useless; instead they gave the administration "intelligence" that they cited to argue for war in Iraq. These policies, in the hands of the Bush administration, are more then a failure. They have harmed us.