When do you think the Bush Admin used torture to try to link Al Qaeda to Iraq

[ck4829]

Poll question: When do you think the Bush Admin used torture to try to link Al Qaeda to Iraq

Shedding some well-needed light on why it could have possibly been necessary to waterboard someone 183 times, McClatchy reports that according to “a former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue,” former Vice-President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld “demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.”

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/04/22/torturing-the-al-qaeda-iraq-connection/

[annabanana]

1. 11am, Sept. 11, 2001

no question

[rcrush]

2. They were probably practicing weeks before 9/11

They needed to make it look legit.

[Echo In Light]

12. Agreed. The torture was on par w/PNAC worldview - CREATE conflict!

[Echo In Light]

14. Other: PNAC, phony wars, etc

[stillcool]

13. I'd bet on that...

they were trying to cook up some intel to invade Iraq from the get-go.

[guitar man]

3. "The hardest part of my job is linking Iraq with the war on terror. ...

GW Bu$h.

His hands are the bloodiest in this mess. :grr:

[TahitiNut]

4. Such torture has only one REAL purpose: The creation of FALSE 'confessions.'

This is very well-known and the basis for every instance of torture in WW2 and the Korean War. Even McCain's experience in the Hanoi Hilton demonstrates CONCLUSIVELY that the North Vietnamese were interested SOLELY in the propaganda value of the falsehoods coerced by torture.

There is absolutely NO MORAL DEFENSE whatsoever for state-sanctioned torture. None.

[Believing Is Art]

6. Well, in their defense . . .

They were using torture for its intended purpose - to elicit false confessions to create propaganda for the war in Iraq. I really wouldn't be surprised if they knew it was false. They just didn't care.

[TahitiNut]

9. Of course they knew it was false. They were programmatically CREATING falsehoods ...

... both in Feith's DOD 'skunk works' and in the WHIG and in the fabricated 'news' created and distributed to media in the U.S. and in Iraq. The Cheney/Bush cabal weren't "mistaken" at all ... there's far, far too much proof that they knowingly and deliberately created a fabric of falsehoods from the very beginning. Hell, even the Iraqi National Congress was a totally astroturfed fabrication from the get-go -- then presented to the sheeple as some contemporary kind of "Free French" government in exile.

[Believing Is Art]

5. I'm sorry

I really can't resist the Freeper options. It's like a bull and a red cape . . .

Besides, I think a lot of them simply don't care if it's "torcher" or not. The Geneva Conventions and the International Red Cross are liberal garbage. It's the only way to keep us safe. They'd do it to us. Etc. and so on.

If they don't consider it torture, then they think we should be torturing. It's fucked up.

[applegrove]

7. I just don't know.

[SteppingRazor]

8. Other: They used it later on after traditional interrogation methods had already been working.

28 March 2002 Abu Zubaydah, a senior Al-Qaeda official, is arrested in Pakistan and brought to the United States for interrogation. Ali Soufan, a supervisory special FBI agent, and a second agent, with CIA agents watching, use traditional interrogation methods to question him from March through June 2002, and learn that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) was the mastermind of the 11 September attacks.


August 2002 Abu Zubaydeh is subjected to waterboarding at least 83 times. A former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, who interrogated Zubaydeh (but who did not witness any of the waterboarding says that "it took only 35 seconds once the technique was employed for Zubaydah to start talking." Kiriakou says that it was torture, but it was necessary. He does not appear to be aware of the multiple waterboardings.

(Note: Kiriakou's claim that that Zubaydeh had refused to cooperate prior to the (first) waterboarding is contradicted by FBI agent Ali Soufan's report that Zubaydeh had been cooperating for months; see above. It's also not clear (yet) whether Zubaydeh was waterboarded or otherwise tortured during the period when Soufan was interrogating him for the FBI.)


Source: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/4/23/723565/-What-We-Know-So-Far:-A-Torture-Timeline-(Updated)


I highly recommend that timeline from DK at the link. Good stuff.

[11 Bravo]

10. Other: Little Boots was in a dick-measuring contest with Poppy competing for ...

the affection of the bug eyed lush. He wanted to take Saddam out where Daddy had not, and he needed an excuse to do so.

[Spazito]

11. I remember this comment from General Wesley Clark on the question of...

the Bush Administration's focus on Iraq immediately after 9/11:

Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Clark said, he visited the Pentagon, where an old colleague, a three-star general, confided to him that the civilian authorities running the Pentagon—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team—planned to use the September 11th attacks as a pretext for going to war against Iraq. “They made the decision to attack Iraq sometime soon after 9/11,” Clark said. “So, rather than searching for a solution to a problem, they had the solution, and their difficulty was to make it appear as though it were in response to a problem.” Clark visited the Pentagon a couple of months later, and the same general told him that the Bush team, unable or unwilling to fight the actual terrorists responsible for the attacks, had devised a five-year plan to topple the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran, and Sudan.

If the basic elements of the story have a familiar ring, it is because Clark’s central contention—that the Bush Administration used September 11th as a pretext to attack Saddam—has been part of the public debate, much discussed in many publications and broadcasts, since well before the Iraq war. It is rooted in the advocacy of an organization called Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank, whose influential circle—including Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and the defense adviser Richard Perle—had been openly arguing for regime change in Iraq, by military force, if necessary, since 1998. That Rumsfeld turned his attention to Iraq almost immediately after the September 11th attacks was reported by Bob Woodward in his book “Bush at War,” published in November, 2002. Clark, in repeatedly telling his account, seems to suggest that he had special knowledge of a furtive Pentagon plan that would have the Administration “hopscotching around the Middle East and knocking off states,” as he put it. He has acknowledged, “I’m not sure that I can prove this yet.”

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/11/17/031117fa_fact?currentPage=all