The Hush-Hush Story: Why They Tortured

The LA Progressive

The US Senate Armed Services Committee report, issued April 21, on the interrogation techniques employed against detainees following the September 11 terrorist attack, wrote Pepe Escobar in the Asia Times, "reads like deja vu all over again: the US establishment under Bush was a replay of the Spanish Inquisition. And it all started even before a single 'high-profile al-Qaeda detainee' was captured.
What Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and assorted little inquisitors wanted was above all to prove the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda, the better to justify a pre-emptive, illegal war planned by the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s. The torture memos were just a cog in the imperial machine."
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman mentioned it in his column April 24, writing, "For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract 'confessions' that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way." Krugman was more explicit in his blog, titled "Grand Unified Scandal" appearing the previous day, after the Senate report came out. "Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link," he wrote. "There's a word for this: it's evil."
The impetus for the comment by Krugman and Escobar was a story carried April 21 in the McClatchy Newspapers by Jonathan S. Landay The story has made the rounds on the internet and in some of the foreign press but as of this writing has been ignored or obscured by most of the major U.S. media.
"The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist," wrote Landay. "Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
"The use of abusive interrogation - widely considered torture - as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them."
Landay went on to quote "A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue" saying former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld 'demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.'
"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," Landay was told. "The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

Few dare call Ahmed Chalabi what he is, an Iranian intelligence agent, who along with AIPAC officials, Israeli Intelligence agents duped Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal into invading Iraq.
And now the Israeli spies will get away with it because the truth of the huge security hole in the Bush Administration will become obvious to all.
Reuters

"Given the diminished likelihood the government will prevail at trial under the additional intent requirements imposed by the court and the inevitable disclosure of classified information that would occur at any trial in this matter, we have asked the court to dismiss the indictment," Dana Boente, acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement.

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