Back On April 26, in my diary "Torture In NeoContext", I picked up on Keith Olbermann's brief introductory summation of how torture had been used to try to produce bogus intelligence tying Iraq to 9/11, and wrote:
Torture wasn't supposed to save us from a ticking time-bomb. Heck "24" was barely starting its first season. Torture was supposed to get al Qaeda operatives to fess up to a non-existent link with Iraq, so we could have the war the neo-cons had been itching for for years, instead of this unwanted distraction by bin Laden and friends.
I went on to tie this scheme back to the well-established (albeit totally ignored) neocon plan for world domination (PNAC's September 2000 "Rebuilding America's Defenses"), in which terrorists play no part whatsoever, but taking over Iraq is an important regional geopolitical move for which Saddam Hussein himself is nothing more than a convenient excuse (p. 14):
Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.
After lying fallow for a few weeks, this story has now exploded with a new angle--information reported at the Daily Beast, and supported by Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Lt. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson--that torture had been used after the invasion of Iraq in an attempt to produce false confessions tying Iraq to al Qaeda. This use of torture clearly would not fall under the purview of the OLC memos, and thus opens a whole new grounds for criminal investigations, which Senator Sheldon Whitehouse today confirmed on both CNN and MSNBC:
The story was further picked up on Countdown this afternoon. Video on flip. |
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The Daily Beast report begins thus:
Robert Windrem, who covered terrorism for NBC, reports exclusively in The Daily Beast that:*Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney's office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.
*The former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, in charge of interrogations, tells The Daily Beast that he considered the request reprehensible.
*Much of the information in the report of the 9/11 Commission was provided through more than 30 sessions of torture of detainees.
At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam's secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.
Two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard an Iraqi prisoner came from the Office of Vice President Cheney.
"To those who wanted or suspected a relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House officials] had particular interest," Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey Group and the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, told me. So much so that the officials, according to Duelfer, inquired how the interrogation was proceeding.
In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from "some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA)," who thought Khudayr's interrogation had been "too gentle" and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. "They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used," Duelfer writes. "The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature."
The relevant portion of Wilkerson's post is this:
what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.
So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.
Connecting Further Dots: Downing Street Memos, Wilson/Plame and The Original Niger Forgeries
In the past, Olbermann has already covered the Downing Street Memos, including the one that describes Bush's intention to invade Iraq no matter what and his willingness to stage a phony incident to justify the invasion. Thus Olbermann is quite aware of at least some of the larger framework of obsessive devotion to constructing a fabricated case no matter what. Whether he will proceed to draw that larger picture over the coming days remains to be seen.
However, at least two further connections seem obvious to make, at least in terms of demanding further examination. First is the fact that these efforts took place after the invasion of Iraq, which puts them in the same time-frame as the outing of Valerie Plame, which in turn suggests a very different larger framework for Cheney's activities at the time than had previously ever been considered.
It had always seemed somewhat strange how wildly Cheney seemed to have over-reacted to Joe Wilson, immediately suspecting an almost Illuminati-style conspiracy against him. Sure, we knew that Cheney was almost psychotically paranoid, but why get so spectacularly bent out of shape at this point, over this issue so close on the heels of Bush's triumphant "Mission Accomplished" moment. But, of course, if Cheney were simultaneously trying to put the finishing touches on a manufactured case for war, then the reaction to Wilson and the outing of Plame no longer seem puzzling at all. Indeed, they are exactly what we'd expect from Cheney if he were not simply sitting back in satisfaction, and scheming over who to invade next, but instead was trying to put the finishing touches on the Iraq fabrication.
The second connection that cries out for another investigative look is the origins of the Niger document forgeries, which were the impetus for Wilson's investigations in the first place. This has never been the focus of any sort of serious attention by anyone excepts us DFHs. It would be very nice indeed to see that change, once and for all.
With President Obama doing everything short of switching parties to try to shut down any questioning of what went on during the last Administration, it seems clear that we need to mount an intense push in support of those, like Whitehouse, who still believe in the rule of law. This may well be the most important single battle of Obama's Administration, because all other progressive hopes may very well ride on the question of whether he can be forced to abandon his fast-growing attachment to the worst aspects of Versailles, by the only means that now seems feasible, which is, quite simply, making it radioactive for him to continue doing so. |
