Iraq Opinion: Three Thoughts on the War --- Lies, Disaster, and the Unexpected Outcome

A reflection 10 years to the day that US warplanes launched the first phase of the war on Iraq: this was a conflict deliberately designed on deceptions and whose consequences are still proving disastrous - most of all for the Iraqi people.

Far from producing the anticipated result, at least for the Bush Administration, the invasion of Iraq led to the opposite; rather than demonstrating the "unipolar" nature of American power, Iraq has become an ongoing illustration of the limits of that power.

Today, as Iraq tries to recover from the past decade, events extending beyond its borders to the wider Middle East highlight the twist in the tale --- that the US, good or bad, is rarely centre stage. Quite often, it is waiting in the wings.

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Iraq Feature: The US Pentagon is Linked to Torture Centres (The Guardian/BBC Arabic)

The 5-minute trailer for the full Guardian/BBC documentary

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The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

Watch the full Guardian/BBC Arabic documentary

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

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War on Terror Flashback: How US Delivered Detainees to Torture in Qaddafi's Libya (Human Rights Watch)

Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch talks to the Guardian about the report of US delivery of detainees to torture in Muammar Qaddafi's Libya

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When rebel forces overtook Tripoli in August 2011, prison doors were opened and office files exposed, revealing startling new information about Libya’s relations with other countries. One such revelation, documented in this report, is the degree of involvement of the United States government under the Bush administration in the arrest of opponents of the former Libyan Leader, Muammar Gaddafi, living abroad, the subsequent torture and other ill-treatment of many of them in US custody, and their forced transfer to back to Libya.

The United States played the most extensive role in the abuses, but other countries, notably the United Kingdom, were also involved.

This is an important chapter in the larger story of the secret and abusive US detention program established under the government of George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and the rendition of individuals to countries with known records of torture.

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US Feature: Countering Rumsfeld's Lie --- Detainees Were Waterboarded (Kaye)

In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News' Sean Hannity recently that "no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the US military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo, period."

In his memoir, "Known and Unknown," Rumsfeld maintained, "To my knowledge, no US military personnel involved in interrogations waterboarded any detainees,not at Guantanamo or anywhere else in the world." But as we shall see, Rumsfeld was either lying outright, or artfully twisting the truth.

Others have insisted as well that the military never waterboarded anyone. Law and national security writer Benjamin Wittes wrote in The New Republic last year that "the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody." Harper's columnist Scott Horton also noted last year, "There is no documentation yet of waterboarding at Gitmo, but the case book is far from closed on that score, too."

Yet, though not widely reported and scattered among various articles and reports on detainee treatment by the military, including first-person accounts, there are a number of stories of forced water choking or drowning, both at Guantanamo and other US military sites.

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Terrorism Weekly: What is Behind Britain's Transportation Alerts?

This is undoubtedly a reminder to the travelling public to be vigilant (although authorities have to be careful: frequent alerts arguably have the opposite effect). However, there is another audience for this alert. In this case the threat is posed not by known terrorists  under surveillance --- about 2000, according to the British intelligence service MI5 ---  but the terrorists who are, in the parlance of Donald Rumsfeld, the “known unknowns". It is a small group or even an individual who has managed to remain under the radar that create concern for obvious reasons.

The message to them is “we are on to you”. Although some terrorists may not be terribly bright, they generally tend to be rational and  thus can be deterred from their plans by a superior show of force or greater vigilance.

Or so the state may hope.

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