Torture and Iraq

Lawrence Wilk­er­son, for­mer chief of staff to Colin Pow­ell when he was sec­re­tary of state, lays a bomb­shell:

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 pre­empt­ing another ter­ror­ist attack on the U.S. but dis­cov­er­ing a smok­ing gun link­ing Iraq and al-Qaeda.

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. (empha­sis added)

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