Heres a little nightmare -- via Patrick Cockburn. It looks like a significant part of the CIAs torture program wasnt to save us from attack but to help them -- i.e. the Bush administration -- justify its coming attack on, invasion of, Iraq. The torturers were being pushed by Dick Cheney and crew to beat links between Saddam H and al-Qaeda out of its prisoners. It was generally unsuccessful in doing so, though as Sam Husseini writes, not in every case. So its possible that misinformation tortured out of prisoners may have played a role in one of the great disasters of American foreign policy. Heres some of the Cockburn (and a link to the Husseini is below). Tom The CIA tortured al-Qaeda suspects because it wanted evidence that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11 in order to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The agency was under intense pressure from the White House and senior figures in the Bush administration to extract confessions confirming co-operation between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaeda, although no significant evidence was ever found. The CIA has defended its actions by claiming that it was “unknowable” if torture had produced results, although the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, maintains torture produced nothing of value. A second line of defence put forward by defenders of the CIA is to say that the agency was swept up in the reaction to 9/11 in the US and needed to find out quickly if there were going to be further attacks. Telling evidence about the motives of the CIA in instituting its torture programme comes in a report on detainee abuse issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2009. It cited a former US Army psychiatrist, Major Charles Burney, who had been stationed at Guantanamo Bay, as saying interrogators were compelled to give priority to one line of questioning. “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, he said. When interrogators failed to do this there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results. unz/pcockburn/cia-torture-report-agency-conduct-was-driven-by-pressure-to-link-iraq-to-al-qaeda-following-911/ Heres that Husseini link: husseini.posthaven/what-both-sides-are-ignoring-torture-did-work-to-produce-war-see-footnote-857-of-report
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 19:00:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015