US Torture Linkage

A few torture-related stories that need to be linked up today.

The first is from Douglas Jehl in the New York Times, citing a new "smoking gun" document from the DIA:

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases."

What the article doesn't say is that al-Libi was probably tortured to "extract" the information. Now, aside from the barbaric, de-humanising hypocrisy of the practice, this is exactly why Western nations have not condoned torture for the past few centuries: any information you get is unlikely to be reliable.

On the other hand, what do Bush and Cheney care about reliable intelligence? They have been discarding it since well before 9/11 in favour of any tidbits of information that can help push their own agenda. And that's exactly what they got out of al-Libi.

The al-Libi case marked a turning point in US handling of terrorist suspects, as this new article from Newsweek makes clear:

[Al-Libi] quickly became the subject of a bitter feud between the FBI and the CIA over how to interrogate terror suspects. At the time of al-Libi's capture on Nov. 11, 2001, the questioning of detainees was still the FBI's province... Al-Libi's capture, some sources say, was an early turning point in the government's internal debates over interrogation methods. FBI officials brought their plea to retain control over al-Libi's interrogation up to FBI Director Robert Mueller. The CIA station chief in Afghanistan, meanwhile, appealed to the agency's hawkish counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black. He in turn called CIA Director George Tenet, who went to the White House. Al-Libi was handed over to the CIA. "They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo" for more-fearsome Egyptian interrogations, says the ex-FBI official. "At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, 'You're going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I'm going to find your mother and I'm going to f--- her.' So we lost that fight."

So the White House got involved and al-Libi got tortured. The article cites a string of emails that lead back to the White House, where people like Gonzales, Miers, Rumsfeld , Addington and Cheney were tellling the Once And Future Chimp that he had the authority to overhaul the "old rules" with a Presidential wave of the hand.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff in the first Bush administration, says he has traced these memos back to Cheney's office. And yet Cheney is still pushing for the Senate to OK torture, despite a concerted block by John McCain and others:

Cheney told his audience the United States doesn't engage in torture, these participants added, even though he said the administration needed an exemption from any legislation banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in case the president decided one was necessary to prevent a terrorist attack.

Cheney is still conjuring up horrow scenarios to terrify people into supporting his mad policies. But the man has a long track record of mis-using intelligence for his own ideology- and business-motivated reasons. Indeed, he was still citing the al-Libi intelligence months after the newly-surfaced memo and even after al-Libi had retracted his claims.

Now the public fear campaign is moving from terrorists (let's get them off the front pages until this blows over) to avian flu to giant asteroids from outer space.

It's time to stop being scared by these fools and start getting angry at them.