Bush Lied, People Were Waterboarded
Great hit for the left! McClatchy-Tribune has the details … some of them, anyway … that among other things, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and Abu Zubaydah were asked about Saddam-al-Qaeda operational ties during their dunkings. McClatchy and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., are delighted to report no evidence of operational ties emerged from the sessions. But this is the part I like:
“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubeida at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.
“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.
“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”
Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.
McClatchy fails to note this fine point, but as of March 2003, Saddam was still in power. In fact, in the second half of that month, an American army that had been massing on the Kuwait-Iraq border was rolling toward Baghdad. Knowledge of operational ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda would not at that time have been simply an interesting history question or a narrow oops/CYA political agenda item for George Bush and Dick Cheney. It would have been a vital national security issue. Whether the CIA liked it or not. As would have been, quite apart from Saddam-AQ links, any intel of WMD.
McClatchy, within the limited scope of this gotcha article, also blew off reports of extensive non-operational contacts between Saddam’s intelligence services and al-Qaeda affiliates, which were revealed by the Pentagon’s review of Baathist intelligence documents two years ago. Also no mention of medical services provided to al Qaeda operatives, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Also no mention of Saddam’s extensive financial and training support for Palestinian and other terrorists. They did manage to get in the unsubstantiated Czech report of a Mohammed Atta-Mukhabarat meeting, which is a bit of a golden oldie in the “Bush Lied People Died” hit parade.
Needless to say, still no mention of who else was enthusiastic about waterboarding back in the day, not to mention worried about Saddam, al Qaeda, WMD, all that.
Firedoglake … what the heck is a firedoglake, anyway? I dunno, sounds like it has a sort of smelly burny wet dog thing going on … gleefully notes what McClatchy didn’t about the timing of the line of questioning, but seems to think there’s a problem with the United States trying to find out whether its enemies are collaborating.
In other torture news, NYT reports that in Obama administration efforts to waterboard Bush administration officials, it withheld key information: Banned Technqies Yielded “High Value’ Information.
Topics: Iraq, al qaeda, media, pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:21 am Comments (1) on Wednesday, April 22, 2009
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April 22nd, 2009 at 8:03 pm
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