How Torture Misled the US into an Illegal War: What Zero Dark Thirty Really Leaves Out
My long held view that torture under the Bush Administration was largely used to produce propaganda so they could go to war for other reasons (greed, power and personal vanity are what I see as the reasons for invading Iraq) is confirmed by the history Juan Cole describes here. The question today is what does torture under our present administration bring us? The idea that it has “gone away” when the system has become so non-transparent as civil liberties are further eroded is highly unlikely. Even if Dick Cheney no longer sits at his desk in the White House bunker waiting for the next graphic report to come in, we still are funding torture with our tax dollars (60% of them in fact go to support our military misadventures).
Al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was captured trying to escape from Afghanistan in late 2001. He was sent to Egypt to be tortured, and under duress alleged that Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda agents in chemical weapons techniques. It was a total crock, and alleged solely to escape further pain. Al-Libi disavowed the allegation when he was returned to CIA custody. But Cheney and Condi Rice ran with the single-source, torture-induced assertion and it was inserted by Scooter Libby in Colin Powell’s infamous speech to the United Nations.
If torture can mislead you into launching a war that results in hundreds of thousands of deaths, then it should be avoided, quite apart from the fact that it is illegal and that the United States is signatory to binding treaties specifying its illegality. (It is coming out that Bush-Cheney’s own CIA Inspector-General expressed the view that the Bush-era torture was medically unsound, did not produce the desired results, and contravened the UN Convention against torture.
Here is what Condi Rice told the Lehrer News Hour in 2002, based on the torture-induced statements of the late al-Libi:
‘ “We clearly know that there were in the past and have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of Al Qaeda going back for actually quite a long time,” Rice said. “We know too that several of the [Al Qaeda] detainees, in particular some high-ranking detainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to Al Qaeda in chemical weapons development.” ‘