I hope someone will ask him about the emerging evidence that despite his increasingly desperate attempts to shape history, the Bush-Cheney torture program was not about protecting Americans from an imminent "ticking time bomb" attack -- but rather was a sadistic attempt to falsify, and then shore up the falsified, case for invading Iraq. The evidence is everywhere. Plain as day.
We tortured Khalid Sheikh Muhammad to try and get him to confess to a link...
Dick Cheney's office -- or maybe he himself -- suggested the torture of an Iraqi intelligence agent -- meaning of someone NOT implicated in the "war on terror" -- in order to get him to confess to a link...
We tortured Abu Zubaydah 83 times in one month to try to get him to falsely confess a link, and this after he had been cooperating with FBI interrogators...
We tortured the now very dead Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi to force him to confess to a link -- and he did. Per Andrew Sullivan:
...Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi was first captured by the US and tortured by CIA surrogates in an Egyptian cell. Apparently, they beat him and put him in a coffin for 17 hours as a mock-burial. To end the severe mental and physical suffering, he confessed that Saddam had trained al Qaeda terrorists in deploying WMDs. This evidence was then cited by Colin Powell as part of the rationale for going to war in Iraq. Powell used that tortured testimony in his phonied up United Nations speech, no less. No wonder he now has such regret...
Two pieces of video that tell the story well, from last night's episodes of "Countdown" and "Rachel Maddow."
Labels: Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Iraq, the torture presidency, torture, Torturegate, war crimes |
