Juan Cole has appeared at several NetRoots meetups, long before the sell-out nature of the great orange Satan became so visible. He is one of the finest students and writers about the Muddle East that I have had the pleasure to meet. Today's article is by his contributor, Rebecca Gordon, who just authored Not al-Qaeda: Abu Zubayda as Bush’s Mengele Experiment

The entire article can be found here: http://www.juancole.com/2016/04/not-al-qaeda-abu-zubayda-as-bushs-mengel...

What is telling is just how many lies were told to the American public, while we tortured, partially blinded, and quite possibly drove insane an ally of the US, an innocent repeatedly and wrongly accused of being #2 or #3 in Al Qaida. Except he wasn't.

Not al-Qaeda: Abu Zubayda as Bush’s Mengele Experiment
By contributors | Apr. 25, 2016 |
By Rebecca Gordon | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – –
Intro: Rebecca Gordon catches the nightmarish quality of those [Bush] years, now largely buried, in the grim case of a single mistreated human being. It should make Americans shudder. She has also just published a new book, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, that couldn’t be more relevant. It’s a must-read for a country conveniently without a memory.

The allegations against the man were serious indeed.

* Donald Rumsfeld said he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person” in al-Qaeda.

* The Central Intelligence Agency informed Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that he “served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant. In that capacity, he has managed a network of training camps… He also acted as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications.”

* CIA Director Michael Hayden would tell the press in 2008 that 25% of all the information his agency had gathered about al-Qaeda from human sources “originated” with one other detainee and him.

* George W. Bush would use his case to justify the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program,” claiming that “he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained” and that “he helped smuggle al-Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan” so they would not be captured by U.S. military forces.

None of it was true.

The relentless nature of the torture we committed is described in more detail. If you can read through this article without feeling despair, anger, revulsion, and fear at what Americans did to this poor man, including two psychologists who were experimenting just to get data on how well their abuse worked, then you should probably vote of Hillary, Cruz, or Trump.

It gets worse:

Zubaydah’s later fate in the hands of the CIA was of a far grimmer nature. He had the dubious luck to be the subject of a number of CIA “firsts”: the first post-9/11 prisoner to be waterboarded; the first to be experimented on by psychologists working as CIA contractors; one of the first of the Agency’s “ghost prisoners” (detainees hidden from the world, including the International Committee of the Red Cross which, under the Geneva Conventions, must be allowed access to every prisoner of war); and one of the first prisoners to be cited in a memo written by Jay Bybee for the Bush administration on what the CIA could “legally” do to a detainee without supposedly violating U.S. federal laws against torture.

I do not wish to run afoul of any copyright rules, and will be contacting Ms. Gordon for permission to quote (with attribution) her article more extensively. This is a story that should be repeated again and again. It is a story that should be brought up to every presidential candidate. It should be plastered on the front page of every daily newspaper, and covered in every national and local news story. The fact that none of this is happening tells us just how rotten, corrupt, and more concerned with moeny and corporate health our system has become.