Wilkerson began looking into the role of torture and the phony Iraq-Al Qaeda connection while still working for Powell; he has continued his investigations as an academic. While he has not gone public with everything he knows, there are other well-documented sources supporting his claim that torture was ordered in search of this non-existent link. Whether torture was used because it produces unreliable results is not yet known. However, it is known that specific warnings about the unreliability of such testimony were suppressed, while the testimony itself was widely circulated and promoted.
The first such testimony is the one that initiated Wilkerson's investigation. It came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, tortured in Egypt before American programs were in place. His testimony was almost immediately questioned in a widely-circulated classified report written on February 22, 2002, warning it was probable that al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers", merely telling them what they wanted to hear in order to stop the torture. That warning was ignored, however, as Al-Libi's testimony (later recanted) played a crucial role in building the case for war.
Al-Libi had given valuable information to an FBI interrogator, Russell Fincher--particularly regarding the "20th hijacker", Zacarias Moussaoui, and the "shoe bomber", Richard Reid--before the CIA intervened, and sent him to Egypt for torture. He was reported dead in a Libyan prison on May 10, an alleged suicide, just thirteen days after his whereabouts were made known for the first time in years.
Without mentioning Al-Libi by name, President Bush touted his false testimony in his October 7, 2002 speech, as did Colin Powell in his February 5, 2003 speech to the UN. Bush's speech was his major address laying out his case for war as Congress was nearing a vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq. In the midst of a mish-mash of questionable and misleading claims, most concerning past events and threats against Iraq's regional adversaries, not the U.S., Bush flatly stated, "We have learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb making, poisons, and deadly gases." But there was no evidence for this except for testimony produced by torture.
Al-Libi's torture-induced testimony played an even stranger role in Colin Powell's speech. According to Colonel Wilkerson, this testimony was not even made available to Powell until it looked like he was going to abandon making the Iraq-terrorist connection altogether. Then it was falsely presented as if it had just been discovered.
"Powell was ready to throw out almost everything Tenet had given him on the contacts of Baghdad with terrorists, particularly al-Qa'ida," Wilkerson told reporter Spencer Ackerman for a May 15 story at FireDogLake.com. "Suddenly, on 1 Feb, there was the shocking revelation of a high-level al-Qa'ida operative who had just revealed significant contacts between al-Qa'ida and Baghdad. Powell changed his mind and that information went into his presentation to the [United Nations Security Council] on 5 Feb 2003. We were never told of the DIA [Defense Intelligency Agency] dissent."
Wilkerson went on to say, "The strong impression was that the interrogation had just occurred or, at a minimum, that Tenet had just received the information."
Al-Libi was just one example, however. The July 2004 Select Committee on Intelligence report on pre-Iraq war intelligence mentions, almost casually that the "CTC [Counter Terrorist Center] noted that the questions regarding al-Qaida's ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented to senior al-Qaida operational planner Khalid Shaikh Muhammad [KSM] following his capture." KSM was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, the month of his capture-the most intensive use of torture recorded by Americans since 9/11.
The same ends were pursued at Guantanamo as well. Former U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Charles Burney is quoted directly and indirectly in the SASC report. In 2006 he told investigators for the Army Inspector General in 2006 that Guantanamo interrogators were under "pressure" to produce evidence of such ties.
"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told them. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
Pressure continued even after the invasion, according to Charles Duelfer, who was in charge of the post-invasion search for WMDs. In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with former NBC producer Robert Windrem for the Daily Beast, Duelfer discussed high-level communications about waterboarding Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, a high-level secret police official.
Windrem cited two unnamed senior U.S. intelligence officials saying that the waterboarding request came from Cheney's office. He then wrote, "'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."
Duelfer did not agree to waterboarding. But the request had been made.
These revelations are extremely serious, notes Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. For one thing, they reopen the question of criminal liability, since such interrogations were not yet justified by the controversial memos from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
"If the motivation for doing this was to get political information connecting Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden, and wasn't related to a direct attack on the United States, then it falls directly under the cases that show waterboarding is a crime in America, and is stripped of all protection from the OLC memoranda. So it's a serious situation," Whitehouse told MSNBC after Wilkerson's charges were made public.
But more broadly, there's a need to understand what really happened, what it cost us, what lessons we can learn, and how to avoid future repetitions. In his June 9 Senate speech, Whitehouse said, "There has been no accounting of the wild goose chases our national security personnel may have been sent on by false statements made by torture victims seeking to end their agony; no accounting of intelligence lost if other sources held back from dealing with us after our descent into what Vice President Cheney
refers to as the "dark side"; no accounting of the harm to our national standing or our international good will from this program; no accounting of the benefit to our enemies' standing--particularly as measured in militant recruitment or fundraising; and no accounting of the impact this program had on information sharing with foreign governments whose laws prohibit such mistreatment."
While Whitehouse remains optimistic about ongoing investigations, the Obama Administration has become increasingly opposed to releasing important information that would make it possible.
"It's far worse than I think we're being lead to believe, and I think Obama has made it worse," said former CIA official Mel Goodman. "He's clearly intimidated by the CIA. This is not change I can believe in."
Yet, reluctantly, the Obama Administration is still being forced to release more and more information. The frustration Goodman feels has been widely shared by civil liberties activists. The need for reform is seen by professionals like Soufan and Senators like Whitehouse. But the opposing forces are extremely powerful, according to historian Alfred McCoy, author of the 2006 book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror.
"From 1950 to 1962, the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reached a cost of a billion dollars annually--a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind," McCoy wrote. This was the background source of "a new approach to torture that was psychological, not physical, perhaps best described as 'no-touch torture'," that nonetheless could do more lasting psychological damage than standard physical torture did. Once the CIA began disseminating its methods to authoritarian allies around the world, all manner of old-fashioned sadistic touches were added to the mix. The result was a very sophisticated methodology for destroying human autonomy and the will to resist, with virtually no reliable field testing to show if it could produce reliable intelligence. That remained a matter of faith.
This was the background that spawned the Bush Administration's use of torture, as was vividly illustrated by a clash between FBI interrogator Ali Soufan and a CIA contractor. It was described in a Newsweek story by Michael Isikoff ('We Could Have Done This the Right Way' web-published April 25):
"I asked [the contractor] if he'd ever interrogated anyone, and he said no," Soufan says. But that didn't matter, the contractor shot back: "Science is science. This is a behavioral issue." The contractor suggested Soufan was the inexperienced one. "He told me he's a psychologist and he knows how the human mind works."
As troubling as this past may be, equally troubling is the difficulty of confronting it, according to McCoy:
"Not only were Justice Department lawyers aggressive in their advocacy of torture in the Bush years, they were meticulous from the start, in laying the legal groundwork for later impunity. No matter how twisted the process, impunity -- whether in England, Indonesia, or America -- usually passes through three stages:
- Blame the supposed "bad apples."
- Invoke the security argument. ("It protected us.")
- Appeal to national unity. ("We need to move forward together.")
For a year after the Abu Ghraib expose, Rumsfeld's Pentagon blamed various low-ranking bad apples by claiming the abuse was "perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military." In recent weeks, Republicans have taken us deep into the second stage with Cheney's statements that the CIA's methods "prevented the violent deaths of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people."
Then, on April 16th, President Obama brought us to the final stage when he released the four Bush-era memos detailing CIA torture, insisting : "Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."
For domestic purposes, Obama seems eager to renounce Bush Administration practices, but still retain the practices of earlier days, allowing for outsourcing torture-the way that Al-Libi's torture was outsourced. Yet, McCoy warns, "This time around, however, a long-distance torture policy may not provide the same insulation as in the past for Washington. Any retreat into torture by remote-control is, in fact, only likely to produce the next scandal that will do yet more damage to America's international standing."
In short-if Bush alienated our allies, and turned the whole world against us, it will be even more devastating if Barack Obama, the symbolic rejection of all that, does nothing more but continue similar practices in a sneakier, less direct way.
"The next time," McCoy warns, "the world will not have forgotten those photos from Abu Ghraib. The next time, the damage to this country will be nothing short of devastating."
