Fearing that President George W. Bush might go down in history as anything less than “the worst ever,” Robert Parry of ConsortiumNews attacks the Bush administration’s attempt to defend the efficacy of torture and the triumph of the 2007 surge in Iraq. Parry draws on two recent articles, one by an ex-Air Force special interrogator in The Washington Post, describing how torture actually led to more American deaths, and another by Donald Rumsfeld in The New York Times, in which he explained how the surge’s success was based on numerous factors outside America’s control. “Torture and abuse cost American lives,” the interrogator wrote. “I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq.” Rumsfeld, who lost his job in late 2006 for proposing a troop drawdown, wrote, “The best indication that timing is everything may be that there had been earlier surges without the same effect as the 2007 surge. In 2005, troop levels in Iraq were increased to numbers nearly equal to the 2007 surge—twice. But the effects were not as durable because large segments of the Sunni population were still providing sanctuary to insurgents, and Iraq’s security forces were not sufficiently capable or large enough.”