We tortured to justify war
Dick Cheney keeps saying "enhanced interrogation" was used to stop
imminent attacks, but evidence is mounting that the real reason was to
invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.

By Joe Conason

May. 14, 2009 |

The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked -- at
least not by the admiring interviewers he has encountered so far -- is
whether he, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush used torture to justify
the illegal invasion of Iraq. As he tours television studios, radio
stations and conservative think tanks, the former vice-president hopes
to persuade America that only waterboarding kept us safe for seven years.

Yet evidence is mounting that under Cheney’s direction, "enhanced
interrogation" was not used exclusively to prevent imminent acts of
terror or collect actionable intelligence -- the aims that he constantly
emphasizes -- but to invent evidence that would link al-Qaida with
Saddam Hussein and connect the late Iraqi dictator to the 9/11 attacks.

In one report after another, from journalists, former administration
officials and Senate investigators, the same theme continues to emerge:
Whenever a prisoner believed to possess any knowledge of al-Qaida’s
operations or Iraqi intelligence came into American custody, CIA
interrogators felt intense pressure from the Bush White House to produce
evidence of an Iraq-Qaida relationship (which contradicted everything
that U.S. intelligence and other experts knew about the enmity between
Saddam’s Baath Party and Osama bin Laden’s jihadists). Indeed, the
futile quest for proof of that connection is the common thread running
through the gruesome stories of torture from the Guantánamo detainee
camp to Egyptian prisons to the CIA's black sites in Thailand and elsewhere.

Perhaps the sharpest rebuke to Cheney's assertions has come from
Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel and former senior State
Department aide to Colin Powell, who says bluntly that when the
administration first authorized "harsh interrogation" during the spring
of 2002, "its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at
pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a
smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaida."

In an essay that first appeared on the Washington Note blog, Wilkerson
says that even when the interrogators of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the
Libyan al-Qaida operative, reported that he had become “compliant” -- in
other words, cooperative after sufficient abuse -- the vice-president’s
office ordered further torture of the Libyan by his hosts at an Egyptian
prison because he had not yet implicated Saddam with al-Qaida. So his
interrogators put al-Libi into a tiny coffin until he said what Cheney
wanted to hear. Nobody in the U.S. intelligence community actually
believed this nonsense. But now, al-Libi has reportedly and very
conveniently "committed suicide" in a prison cell in Libya, where he was
dispatched to the tender mercies of the Bush administration's newfound
friends in the Qaddafi regime several years ago. So the deceased man
won't be able to discuss what actually happened to him and why.

Wilkerson's essay was followed swiftly by an investigative report in the
Daily Beast, authored by former NBC News producer Robert Windrem, who
interviewed two former senior intelligence officers who told him a
similar story about a different prisoner. In April 2003, U.S. forces
captured an Iraqi official named Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, who had
served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat. Those unnamed
officials said that upon learning of Dulaymi's capture, the
vice-president's office proposed that CIA agents in Baghdad commence
waterboarding him, in order to elicit information about a link between
al-Qaida and Saddam. Evidently that suggestion was not enforced by
Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Study Group who controlled
Dulaymi's interrogation.

The same kind of demands were directed toward interrogators in
Guantánamo, according to the testimony of former Army psychiatrist
Charles Burney, who testified that he and his colleagues interrogating
prisoners at the detention camp felt "pressure" to produce proof of the
mythical link.

"While we were there, a large part of the time we were focused on trying
to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful
in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," he told the Army
inspector general. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to
establish that link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to
measures that might produce more immediate results." In other words,
they were instructed to use abusive techniques, as recounted in the
investigation of torture by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Looking back, we now know that coerced confessions -- and in particular
the questionable assertions by al-Libi -- were highlighted by
administration officials promoting the case for war with Iraq, in the
landmark Cincinnati speech by President Bush in October 2002 and in
Colin Powell’s crucial presentation to the U.N. Security Council in
February 2003, the eve of the war.

Whether Bush, Cheney and their associates were seeking real or
fabricated intelligence, they knowingly employed methods that were
certain to produce the latter -- as American officials well knew because
those same techniques, especially water torture, had been used to elicit
false confessions from captured Americans as long ago as World War II
and the Korean conflict.

Cheney now claims that he preserved the country from terrorism and
saved thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. We need a
serious investigation, with witnesses including the former
vice-president under oath, to determine what he and his associates
actually did with the brutal powers they arrogated to themselves --
because instead their actions cost thousands upon thousands of American
and Iraqi lives, all in the service of a political lie.

From...SLATE

HK wrote:
We torture........................................... .....................

Yawn

On May 16, 8:17*am, jim7856 wrote:
HK wrote:
We torture........................................... ......................

Yawn

The alleged smartest, most educated, most successful, Yale grad,
engineer, writer, reporter, adventurer has NOTHING but cut and paste.
Oh, and childish name calling.

On Sat, 16 May 2009 07:07:32 -0400, HK wrote:

We tortured to justify war
Dick Cheney keeps saying "enhanced interrogation" was used to stop
imminent attacks, but evidence is mounting that the real reason was to
invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.

The methods used were perfected by the Chinese to force false
confessions. They didn't care about real intel, they wanted to
bolster their case for going into Iraq.

Cheney is an evil ******* who sold our souls for his personal crusade.