Torture, Cheney, and "The Stovepipe"...

[Junkdrawer]

In October 2003, Seymour Hersh wrote the seminal article detailing how Dick Cheney was able to circumvent all the checks and balances of the Intelligence establishment and manipulate the CIA into backing the Iraq War:

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The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”

The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”

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http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/27/031027fa_fact?currentPage=1

The onset of the use of torture and torture memos took place in exactly the same timeframe. And I submit the goal of the torture was very much the same: shape intelligence to your goals and, in the process, expand your control.

So, how does forcing the CIA to use torture expand your control? Simple: By getting people up and down the chain to break US and International laws, you create an Us vs Them mindset that looks to the top for protection from prosecution. Once someone convinces you to break the law for them, they own you.

Oh, and the same goes for the Congressional leadership. After 9/11, the country was in a “Let’s get ‘em, no holds barred” mindset.



So Cheney approaches the Congressional leadership and says “Hey, we’re going after the Bad Guys and we’re planning on wiretaps, and enhanced interrogation techniques.” And when the leadership said “Go for it!”, he had them.