Torturing Truth To Get To War?
"I want my colleagues and the American public to know that, measured against the information I have been able to gain access to, the story line we have been led to believe--the story line about waterboarding we have been sold--is false in every one of its dimensions." -- Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), speech to the US Senate, June 9. 2009.
For more than a month now, former Vice President Dick Cheney has been on a media blitz pushing the cause of torture under a more sanitized name. At the same time, more and more holes have been poked in his rosy view of the effectiveness of physical and psychological coercion. There's even evidence that getting bad intelligence to justify invading Iraq may have been part of the point, almost from the very beginning.
On April 22, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) released a report, "Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody," which concluded that harsh treatment "increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies." It also included testimony that torture was used in an attempt to establish a non-existent operational link between Iraq and al Qaeda. On May 13, Ali Soufan, formerly a top FBI interrogator, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture and borderline torture) "are ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda."
That same day, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, wrote in the Washington Note, "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."
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