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Dick Cheney simply knows
On Tue, 12 May 2009 20:22:58 -0400, Cliff wrote:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.co...ify-a-war.html [ ... there are many things that Dick Cheney simply knows - even though the CIA, the State Department, and much of the professional machinery of government might disagree. In fact, disagreement by State and CIA actually only tends to confirm Cheney's view, in his mind, that he is always, always right. So what were the two things of which Cheney was completely sure after 9/11, regardless of the objective evidence? He was sure that there was an operational connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, and sure that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. ] [ .... Cheney had already been responsible for the worst attack on American soil in US history. By his reading of his oath of office, he had already broken it. So he finds two potential Qaeda suspects and they are interrogated ... but although they tell him a lot about al Qaeda, they don't tell him what he wants to know and believes is true. And what he believes is true could, in his mind, threaten the US and thousands of American lives. He wasn't alone in this fear. I was right there along with him, as most of us were. But, from all we now know, he went one step further in this quest than any American elected official had ever done in history before. From much of what we can glean, it was only after the suspects had given up lots of info, but not the info Cheney wanted, that the torture started, as it usually does in history. It starts with someone empowered with torture to get from a victim the words that will confirm what the torturer already believes. This evidence can then be publicly cited as proof that Cheney is right ... and justify further torture and even, in this case, partly justify an entire war that killed tens of thousands and cost trillions of dollars and still has almost the entire US military locked down with no way out in the middle of the Middle East. Moreover, the result of torture - it worked! you can almost hear Cheney exult - proves that other potential torture victims could also be forced to tell us the same thing. ] [ And so Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi was first captured by the US and tortured by CIA surrogates in an Egyptian cell. Apparently, they beat him and put him in a coffin for 17 hours as a mock-burial. To end the severe mental and physical suffering, he confessed that Saddam had trained al Qaeda terrorists in deploying WMDs. This evidence was then cited by Colin Powell as part of the rationale for going to war in Iraq. Bingo! And we wonder why torture is such a temptation. Which politician wouldn't want to be able to manufacture evidence to support what he wants to do anyway? ] [ And David Rose subsequently discovered what Bush and Cheney got out of the torture session, once the professional interrogators had been ushered out: Rose quotes a Pentagon analyst who read the transcripts from the interrogation: “Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and Al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.” That analyst did not then know that the evidence was procured through torture. “As soon as I learnt that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done,” the analyst says. We still have memos and a bureaucratic paper trail. But we don't have the tapes of those torture sessions which were destroyed - yes this is a Hollywood movie - by the CIA. And as for al-Libi, a man who could also flesh out the details of his torture and what Cheney forced him to say ... well, for a long time, he simply went missing: "I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. "He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war." Yesterday, he was found dead in a Libyan jail, an apparent "suicide". ] Seems pretty dead on to me. |
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