Cheney’s motives
Very interesting post by Dan Froomkin, which begins:
I’ve been amazed at how little media pickup there’s been of the
revelation by the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that the White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a "ticking time bomb" scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks.Now comes Lawrence Wilkerson, the firebrand former chief of staff to Colin Powell, who writes on the Washington Note blog with more on that story.
And he traces it right back to former vice president Dick Cheney.
"[W]hat I have learned," Wilkerson writes, "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 pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida."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.
"There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just ‘committed suicide‘ in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)"
Wilkerson first came to my attention in October 2005, when he went public with his conclusion that a secret cabal led by the vice president has hijacked U.S. foreign policy, inveigled the president, condoned torture and crippled the ability of the government to respond to emergencies.
Was he wrong? Hardly. And Wilkerson, a Republican, has been a persistent and prescient critic of the Bush/Cheney regime — and its effect on his party — ever since.
As for Cheney, his sudden visibility is stirring up a lot of strong feelings — and dark humor. For the last three days, my "Cartoon Watch" has been dominated by Cheney cartoons.
Dan Balz writes in The Washington Post: …
