The Bush administration was set on torturing people, NOT to prevent another attack...

[Brenda]

The reason the Bush Administration tortured was not to collect information about future terrorist attacks, but to force confessions out of people they captured pre-invasion to prove a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida.

Lots of others have pointed out that the Bush administration was set on torturing people over the opinions of experts in the field who knew that torture produces, at most, unreliable information. They carefully wrote their memos justifying their actions to leave out the strong objections from the FBI, military, and even a CIA official who resigned in protest so that it would seem like they could get good information from torture.

We also know that back in the lead-up to the war in Iraq we were told repeatedly that there was a link between 9/11 and Iraq so that Americans would support that war. They really, really wanted that to be true, no matter how ridiculous the idea was that a secular and oppressive dictator would allow a para-governmental terror syndicate to operate within his borders. But wouldn't it have been a lot easier to justify the war if there was a connection?

The only thing torture's ever been good for is gathering false confessions. Just look at the Spanish Inquisition. Here's Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's former chief of staff, yesterday:


Likewise, 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.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just "committed suicide" in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi....)

This isn't entirely new. McClatchy reported this a few weeks ago:

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation -- widely considered torture -- as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

That same article goes on to quote a Major from 2006 who said that "measures that might produce more immediate results" were used when trying to "establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq":

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"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 staff of the Army Inspector General. "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."

Excerpts from Burney's interview appeared in a full, declassified report on a two-year investigation into detainee abuse released on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., called Burney's statement "very significant."

"I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist."

Inky99 also has some select quotes from the 9/11 commission's report about torture being used to garner confessions about a link between al Qaida and Iraq:

*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.