Dick Cheney wanted to got to war against Iraq. He lied about it. Bush lied about it. But, we're supposed to believe that they never lied to Congress about torture. Right. That may work with D.C.'s traditional media, but not anyone who actually remembers 2002.
There is an even more disturbing aspect to this story. It may be too much for the traditional media to handle. We're learning that Cheney used torture to "prove" the links between al Qaeda and Iraq -- because nothing else was finding the information he wanted.
Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson explained his findings at The Washington Note:
Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--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-Qa'ida.That same assertion was made by an Army psychiatrist who monitored the torture:
So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.
There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just "committed suicide" in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi....)
And an Army psychiatrist assigned to support questioning of suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba told the service's inspector-general that interrogators there were trying to connect al Qaeda and Iraq.That's the story the traditional media should be covering -- intensely.
"This is my opinion," Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general's office. "Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
Instead, reporters and pundits are agog that Nancy Pelosi would have the audacity to say the Bush administration lied to Congress back in 2002-3. The Bush administration lied to the American people every day. And, torture was the only way they could connect al Qaeda to Iraq. Digby succinctly explained it for us:
By now there is overwhelming evidence that Cheney was desperate to find a connection between Iraq and 9/11. He pressured the CIA. He outed a CIA agent. He went on television and said that it was proven. What we didn't know until recently was the extent to which he was pressuring the CIA to torture false confessions out of prisoners to back up his claims. Much of that still remains cloudy, but it's quite clear to sentient beings that there were people involved in the torture regime who had to know very well that the torture they employed was designed to produce false confessions. The CIA and the top echelons of the Pentagon and the White House simply aren't that dumb.But, the Bush White House knew it could count on a compliant press corps, which simply was -- and is -- that dumb or dumbstruck.
A lot of people died because of Bush's lies and Cheney's torture. But, you know, the D.C. establishment doesn't like to re-visit the past, especially when it exposes their failures.
