Cheney used torture used to build a phony case for Iraq war

It's beginning to appear that torture was not only used under the guise of "keeping the country safe" after 9/11, but also to build a case for war with Iraq, especially as evidence piled up that Iraq did not have WMD's.

As more information leaks out, it appears that the Bush Administration was torturing detainees in order to build, then buttress, it's case that Saddam Hussein was an iminent danger to the U.S.

(CNN)
Finding a "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the abusive interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, a former State Department official told CNN on Thursday.

The allegation was included in an online broadside aimed at former Vice President Dick Cheney by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney's office kept close tabs on the questioning.

"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda," Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said his accusation is based on information from current and former officials. He said he has been "relentlessly digging" since 2004, when Powell asked him to look into the scandal surrounding the treatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

The argument that Iraq could have provided weapons of mass destruction to terrorists such as al Qaeda was a key element of the Bush administration's case for the March 2003 invasion. But after the invasion, Iraq was found to have dismantled its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, and the independent commission that investigated the 2001 attacks found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between the two entities.

Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.

At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.

"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."

Al-Libi's claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. It also was part of Powell's February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war, a speech Powell has called a "blot" on his record.

Al-Libi later recanted the claim, saying it was made under torture by Egyptian intelligence agents, a claim Egypt denies. He died last week in a Libyan prison, reportedly a suicide, Human Rights Watch reported.

Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for the U.S.-based group, called al-Libi's allegation "pivotal" to the Bush administration's case for war, as it connected Baghdad to the terrorist organization behind the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

This is becoming a web of lies almost too big to fathom. We have the Vice-President of the United States authorizing torture in a bid to create a case for war because he knows that conventional means won't work.

(Josh Marshall via Sullivan)
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

He orders the torture ostensibly to protect American lives, and now demonizes the Obama Administration for not continuing the "advanced interrogations. Cheney accuses Obama of endangering American lives, leaving out a major part it: his own administration did not use advanced interrogation in it's second term. As Colin Powell's top aide says:

"What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009. So, if we are to believe the protestations of Dick Cheney, that Obama's having shut down the "Cheney interrogation methods" will endanger the nation, what are we to say to Dick Cheney for having endangered the nation for the last four years of his vice presidency?" — Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former
chief of staff of Colin Powell's Department of State

Plus, in a bid to demonize the Speaker of the House, the GOP are creating distractions about what she knew and when she knew it. Never mind that she was in the minority party that was being steamrolled, and painted as unpatriotic for opposing the buildup to war.

I've opposed the cries of "war crimes". Until now. I think we're approaching that arena.