Like Playing Chess with Human Lives

On the eve of Barack Obama’s acceptance of the Democratic Party nomination for reelection as president, a new report detailing the waterboarding and other forms of CIA torture meted out to Libyan detainees served to demolish the Democrats’ image, endlessly promoted at their convention in Charlotte, as the “party of the people.”

Coming barely one week after Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, announced the Justice Department’s shutting down of all investigations into CIA torture and other crimes committed in the “global war on terrorism,” the report makes clear that the use of torture was far more extensive than previously acknowledged and underscores the continuing criminality of US foreign policy and both major political parties.

The 156-page report produced by Human Rights Watch (HW) is based upon interviews with 14 Libyans subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture by the CIA and then forcibly returned to Libya, where they were imprisoned and in some cases tortured again by the government of Col. Muammar Gaddafi. Substantiating their testimony are classified documents — communications between the CIA and Libyan intelligence — found in the abandoned offices of former Libyan intelligence chief Musa Kusa after Tripoli fell to NATO-backed rebels in September 2011.

Thus, the evidence exposing one set of crimes by the US government — rendition and torture under the Bush administration — was uncovered as a by-product of another: the launching of a war of aggression under Obama to lay hold of Libya and its vast energy reserves. Indeed, those who in 2003 and 2004 were imprisoned and tortured as “terrorists” — Libyan Islamist jihadists — were proclaimed as “freedom fighters” when employed by the US and NATO to topple the Gaddafi regime.
~ from Obama and the Cover-Up of CIA Torture by Bill Van Auken ~