Torture Used to Get Bogus Intelligence for Iraqi War

It seems there was another source of bogus intelligence before the Iraqi war besides the Iraqi defector, 'Curveball'. Worse yet, it would appear that this Al Qaeda captive was one of the first to undergo torture by the CIA under authority of the President. It appears he was the source of bogus information that Sadaam had trained Al Qaeda operatives. Apparently, either, under torture, the Al Qaeda operative gave the interagators what they wanted to hear or Al Qaeda wanted the US to invade Iraq and provided Bush with a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda that was readily accepted as further justification of the invasion of Iraq, despite it's obvious counter-intuitive nature. None-the-less, the Administration either assumed the information was accurate or decided to use it anyway because it fit into their world view. Saddam was evil, connected to world terror, and needed to be taken out. I'm sure any doubts were apparent to key players. I'd prefer to believe that not all Administration officials were as naive as Wolfowitz and took the cynical pragmatic view that true or not, the information would politically justify the invasion of Iraq. Bush played right into bin Ladin's hands.
New York Times

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.


[...The] report [was] by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which supplies intelligence to military commanders and national security policy makers. As an official intelligence report, labeled DITSUM No. 044-02, the document would have circulated widely within the government, and it would have been available to the C.I.A., the White House, the Pentagon and other agencies. It remains unclear whether the D.I.A. document was provided to the Senate panel. In outlining reasons for its skepticism, the D.I.A. report noted that Mr. Libi’s claims lacked specific details about the Iraqis involved, the illicit weapons used and the location where the training was to have taken place. “It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers,’’ the February 2002 report said. “Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.’’


Mr. Powell relied heavily on accounts provided by Mr. Libi for his speech to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, saying that he was tracing “the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaeda.’’ At the time of Mr. Powell’s speech, an unclassified statement by the C.I.A. described the reporting, now known to have been from Mr. Libi, as “credible.’’ But Mr. Levin said he had learned that a classified C.I.A. assessment at the time stated “the source was not in a position to know if any training had taken place.’’ In an interview on Friday, Mr. Levin also called attention to a portion of the D.I.A. report that expressed skepticism about the idea of close collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, an idea that was never substantiated by American intelligence but was a pillar of the administration’s prewar claims. “Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements,’’ the D.I.A. report said in one of two declassified paragraphs. “Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.’’ MORE

After reviewing the NY Times article, Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah makes some strong speculative assertion. His logic is unassailable.

• The intelligence from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was almost certainly gotten using torture.
  


• The Administration should have known of DIA's doubts but still prominently used al-Libi's intelligence as proof of an Al Qaeda-Iraq relationship.
  


• The DIA may have withheld the document detailing DIA's doubts about al-Libi from the relevant oversight committees.
  

And Emptywheel turns out to be right. Atrios at Eschaton found this article from Newsweek.
MSNBC.com

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was America's first big trophy in the war on terror: a senior Qaeda operative captured amid the fighting in Afghanistan. What is less known is that al-Libi, who ran Qaeda training camps, quickly became the subject of a bitter feud between the FBI and the CIA over how to interrogate terror suspects. At the time of al-Libi's capture on Nov. 11, 2001, the questioning of detainees was still the FBI's province.


For years the bureau's "bin Laden team" had sought to win suspects over with a carrots-and-no-sticks approach: favors in exchange for cooperation. One terrorist, in return for talking, even wangled a heart transplant for his child. With al-Libi, too, the initial approach was to read him his rights like any arrestee, one former member of the FBI team told NEWSWEEK. "He was basically cooperating with us."


But this was post-9/11; President Bush had declared war on Al Qaeda, and in a series of covert directives, he had authorized the CIA to set up secret interrogation facilities and to use new, harsher methods. The CIA, says the FBI source, was "fighting with us tooth and nail." The handling of al-Libi touched off a long-running battle over interrogation tactics inside the administration. It is a struggle that continued right up until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April—and it extended into the White House, with Condoleezza Rice's National Security Council pitted against lawyers for the White House counsel and the vice president. Indeed, one reason the prison abuse scandal won't go away—two months after gruesome photos were published worldwide—is that a long paper trail of memos and directives from inside the administration has emerged, often leaked by those who disagreed with rougher means of questioning.


[...]Al-Libi's capture, some sources say, was an early turning point in the government's internal debates over interrogation methods. FBI officials brought their plea to retain control over al-Libi's interrogation up to FBI Director Robert Mueller. The CIA station chief in Afghanistan, meanwhile, appealed to the agency's hawkish counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black. He in turn called CIA Director George Tenet, who went to the White House. Al-Libi was handed over to the CIA. "They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo" for more-fearsome Egyptian interrogations, says the ex-FBI official. "At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, 'You're going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I'm going to find your mother and I'm going to f--- her.' So we lost that fight." (A CIA official said he had no comment.) MORE

Al-Libi was one of the first Al Qaeda operative to be "rendered" to a country that uses torture. Later he was moved to Gitmo where he presumably still resides. The Neo-cons throttle hold on intelligence no doubt ensured doubts about Iraqi ties with Al Qaeda went no further than the inner circle at the Office of Special Plans and the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal. It's pretty sad where we have to decide with the Administration was simply stupidly naive or defrauding the American people. I take the latter view.