The conflict and deception in the life and career of former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik was well documented. The Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal provided ample evidence that Kerik had been less than forthcoming with Congress during his confirmation process to become head of the new Homeland Security Department.

As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank put it, the nomination of the “would-be homeland security secretary,” was “doomed by reports of unpaid taxes to an undocumented nanny, unreported gifts from an unsavory company and an unpleasant lawsuit linked to an unseemly assignation.”

By December 31, 2004 Kerik had withdrawn his nomination for personal reasons. “The previous week,” wrote Milbank. “The White House vigorously defended Bernard B. Kerik, its choice for secretary of homeland security, against conflict-of-interest allegations — including earning $6.2 million in two years consulting for a company that did business with the Department of Homeland Security.”

As it turned out Bernard or “Bernie” Kerik had made his millions by investing in the company that makes the Taser –It would profit heavily from contracts with America’s Homeland Security and state and local police.

As more chapters were added to Kerik’s story it seemed he would disappear permanently from the Bush Administration’s list of reliable sources on things like Iraq’s role in 9/11 or how the Iraqi police forces were doing. Kerik’s use of an apartment designated for tired 9/11 emergency workers for a liaison with a mistress seemed to have put a permanent end to the use of Kerik stories by White House officials.

Yet, on April 12, 2006, Bush advisor Karl Rove decided that the reputation of his friend “Bernie” Kerik had healed sufficiently that he could revive one of Kerik’s Iraq stories about viewing torture tapes in Iraq.

In his speech before the Houston Forum, Karl Rove retold a story he says Kerik told him personally about having seen “tens of thousands” of torture tapes at a Baghdad police station. The story dates back to an OP-ED Kerik wrote, and it had also been used by
Vice President Dick Cheney on October 17, 2003. Cheney was presenting his audience with a list of justifications for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a list that has since been discredited .

None of the controversy seemed to be on Karl Rove’s mind April 12th 2006 as he defended the President’s decision to invade Iraq. In fact, he became as emotional as any preacher telling a story designed to build faith.

“It’s really hard for us to understand the barbarism that we find in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. “A totalitarian regime that exalts in the complete absence of personal freedom; the complete oppression of women, the total control of thought and action, and the routine every day constant use of torture and violence on a massive scale that a sophisticated and civilized mind finds very hard to accept.”

Having thus set the scene Rove began; “I remember sitting in my office in the second floor of the West Wing with Bernie Kerik, tough guy, grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in New York. His life was saved by becoming a cop. He told me he thought he had seen every form of violence that one human being could commit on another human being until he went to Baghdad where he went to train the Iraqi police. And he said he had cases, metal cabinets in his office full of video tapes and DVDs, and he said, “what are those?” -And his interpreter said, “those are tapes and DVDs of torture sessions,” and there were tens of thousands of sessions captured on tape. He took a look at some of them and said he was so revolted that he could not watch them any further and he could not stop from weeping from the violence committed on children in front of their parents, husbands and wives in front of their spouses, and torture that is just impossible for us to understand.”

Finally, Rove moved in for the big finish, the making of a direct link between the torture story he had just told and the President’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003: “Faced with an attack from an ideological enemy of this sort this President made a decision grounded in the understanding that we face a different challenge at a different time. In this new century we cannot and must not wait until we are attacked again. We must confront the mortal danger we face and stay on the offense. We must confront nations who harbor terrorists and treat them the same way we treat terrorists themselves. The President articulated a new doctrine when he said if you train a terrorist, harbor a terrorist, free feed a terrorist, fund a terrorist, you’re just as bad as a terrorist themselves and we will defend our freedom by taking action against you. It is the way we must act in this new century,”

In a Talk Nation Radio interview April 25th Kevin Murray considered what Rove was trying to do with the Kerik story. Murray is the director of communications and advocacy at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee which is a member of the National Religious Campaign against Torture –He said he would need to know more details about the tapes to be sure if there was something real in Kerik’s story, pointing out that, “It is pretty widely accepted that there was a lot of torture and mistreatment of people under Saddam Hussein so that that’s a justification that he is coming back to for the war effort, one that’s increasingly unpopular with the people in this country.”

As we looked at Rove’s comments more closely Murray said: “The administration still maintains that it is not systematically using torture in Iraq or elsewhere and I think against all evidence it is maintaining that. And I think he is still spinning that idea with what he is saying. Subliminally he is distancing us from these horrible people that were doing this torture that required that we intervene militarily, preemptively.”

Through some basic internet research on Bernard B. Kerik, torture in Iraq, and prison conditions there, it became obvious that there is a contiguous thread running through myriad aspects to these topics. One operative word is propaganda. Another is profit. And finally we have politics.

As to the profits, the U.S. has come to view Iraq’s prison industry as one of the only things left worth putting money into. Money means contracts and contracts mean profits, but the U.S. appears to be intent on paying for a larger prison system in Iraq than Hussein had. One of the items provided to Iraqi prisons happens to be Tasers.

The 2006 supplemental spending bill for Iraq “pays for prisons, not reconstruction,” explained James F. Jeffrey, Senior Advisor to the Secretary and Coordinator for Iraq in an On-the-Record Briefing, in Washington D.C., February 28, 2006. “These two budgets,” he explained; “The only new construction is related to prisons, you know, which we see as a rule of law, capacity-building.”

As to the politics, the President argued before Congress in 2004; “Had we failed to act, Security Council resolutions on Iraq would have been revealed as empty threats, weakening the United Nations and encouraging defiance by dictators around the world. Iraq’s torture chambers would still be filled with victims, terrified and innocent. The killing fields of Iraq — where hundreds of thousands of men and women and children vanished into the sands — would still be known only to the killers. For all who love freedom and peace, the world without Saddam Hussein’s regime is a better and safer place.”

Even then George W. Bush could have noted that Iraq was more violent and more unstable than it was before his invasion. Some might have called portions of Iraq, “killing fields,” by then. And as to the defiance of dictators, Iran’s leaders seemed unimpressed with the Iraq war as any kind of a deterrent.

Finally, Iraq’s “torture chambers,” as we know were by then America’s “torture chambers.” Iraqi prisons have merely gone from being Iraqi run hell holes to being U.S. run hell holes. Now they are being returned to Iraq control and human rights organizations are once again noting the torture going on behind their walls.

In light of these facts we might want to ask why Karl Rove brought Bernie Kerik’s torture tape story up at all. Why rock the reality boat even as you are facing round three of testimony before the Special Prosecutor in the leak case about Valerie Plame Wilson? There are likely answers to be found within the larger U.S. propaganda effort.

Kerik’s stories fit into the lexicon of tried and tested propaganda very well. They are confusing and divisive. They cannot be easily dismissed or discussed by people of diverse political and social backgrounds. And they have enough truth in them to be highly attractive to those who want to continue to believe in the President’s rhetoric on U.S. superiority. For all of these reasons Bernie Kerik’s comments took on a life of their own in right wing chat rooms on the internet. Ultimately, FOX News dug up a torture tape though it is unclear where they got it.

Second, the comments from Rove are in keeping with the policies of the State Department’s public affairs division under Karen Hughes. An NPR series on Karen Hughes and her “Rapid Response Center” reveals a clear policy of propaganda and dissembling. But there is also a clear lack of concern for the detail of any events that get spun.

In the NPR report we hear Hughes’ staff discuss accusations about America’s use of white phosphorus or the shooting of Iraqi civilians in Haditha without apparent recognition for the severity of the crimes in these cases. White phosphorus is a banned weapon, and a recent Time Magazine has made allegations that U.S. troops committed crimes in Haditha.

Yet, the law is clearly not the main point for Hughes and Karl Rove who are working desperately to maintain at least some shred of illusion that the Iraq war was necessary. In 2003 and 2004 the Administration saw Bernie Kerik as someone who could help maintain such necessary illusions.

He had said in his 2003 OP-ED in the Wall Street Journal, “I don’t care if they find them [weapons of mass destruction] or not. Saddam tortured and killed one million people. Somebody had to go there.”

Such obvious rhetoric about the Iraq invasion would be shrugged off by most Americans today as ridiculous. The nation is now savvy. Yet, stories about torturing and killing people continue to have an impact and that is why people like Jeff Gannon are so relentless about them. You can find his latest comments on “Old Media Spin On Saddam Tapes” on his web site, and this could be an indication of a broader effort to revive the story.

“The Associated Press has put its “special correspondent” on the Saddam tapes. Nope, no WMDs, “Bush lied!” Gannon wrote in March 2006.

In addition to such spin, there are also ongoing efforts behind the scenes to squelch major stories about Iraq. Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, or someone with roughly the same job description, must be doing a good job on the torture story because the big news that it is still going on in Iraq is not being widely reported. Essentially, the story of torture in Iraq has fallen back into the hands of progressive reporters and human rights groups like Amnesty International are working furiously to call attention to the crisis.

In one relevant case reported in Amnesty International’s March 6, 2006 report, Beyond Abu Ghraib: detention and torture in Iraq a man named Karim tells his story of being “detained and tortured by U.S. forces in 2003 and then by Iraqi forces in 2005.”

Ironically, Karim’s testimony includes his mention of the use of a stun gun (taser) on him.

According to Amnesty International, the 47-year-old described as an imam and preacher, (khatib) reports what happened to him as he was detained, released, and then re-arrested. He says he was, “insulted, blindfolded, beaten and subjected to electric shocks from a stun gun (taser) by US troops at a detention facility in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad. After seven days of detention, he was released without charges.”

The date of Karim’s latest detention was May 2005 when he spent 16 days in the custody of the, “forces of the Iraqi Interior Ministry at a detention facility they operated in Baghdad.”

So things have come full circle. Iraqis who were tortured during the Hussein regime might have experienced torture again during the U.S. occupation. It is shocking that as more prison duties are turned back over to the Iraqis they might be tortured some more.

Dare we ask if the degree of this torture has varied at all under changing authorities? Does it even matter? The Amnesty International report goes on to say that Karim’s life was threatened and, “During this detention, he was blindfolded and then beaten and subjected to electric shocks while being hung up in a manner designed to cause him excruciating pain.”