Tortured To Justify A War?

Original Link: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/05/tortured-to-justify-a-war.html

By Andrew Sullivan

One key thing to understand about torture is that it almost never occurs when the torturers know nothing and need to find out something. That's why seeing it as an interrogation tool, properly understood, is actually oxymoronic. What torture is about is forcing a victim to tell you something you already think you know but want confirmed - either to prevent an attack or use as propaganda or deploy against another suspect. And, as one recalls, there are many things that Dick Cheney simply knows - even though the CIA, the State Department, and much of the professional machinery of government might disagree. In fact, disagreement by State and CIA actually only tends to confirm Cheney's view, in his mind, that he is always, always right.

So what were the two things of which Cheney was completely sure after 9/11, regardless of the objective evidence? He was sure that there was an operational connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, and sure that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In Cheney's defense, these were judgments based on completely legitimate fears - and any president or vice-president would be duty bound to figure them out. After 9/11, the possibility of al Qaeda with WMDs was terrifying, and Cheney had already been responsible for the worst attack on American soil in US history. By his reading of his oath of office, he had already broken it. So he finds two potential Qaeda suspects and they are interrogated ... but although they tell him a lot about al Qaeda, they don't tell him what he wants to know and believes is true. And what he believes is true could, in his mind, threaten the US and thousands of American lives. He wasn't alone in this fear. I was right there along with him, as most of us were. But, from all we now know, he went one step further in this quest than any American elected official had ever done in history before.

From much of what we can glean, it was only after the suspects had given up lots of info, but not the info Cheney wanted, that the torture started, as it usually does in history. It starts with someone empowered with torture to get from a victim the words that will confirm what the torturer already believes. This evidence can then be publicly cited as proof that Cheney is right ... and justify further torture and even, in this case, partly justify an entire war that killed tens of thousands and cost trillions of dollars and still has almost the entire US military locked down with no way out in the middle of the Middle East. Moreover, the result of torture - it worked! you can almost hear Cheney exult - proves that other potential torture victims could also be forced to tell us the same thing. And so the temptation to torture deepens with every session - as you believe you are nearing the truth, even as, in reality, you are entering a dark hole from which there is no escaping.

And so 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. Bingo! And we wonder why torture is such a temptation. Which politician wouldn't want to be able to manufacture evidence to support what he wants to do anyway? Take that, Valerie Plame!

Now you see the temptation to use Zubaydah for the same purpose.

He'd been interrogated successfully, given up huge amounts of information when being treated humanely, even kindly, in hospital and after - but not enough for Cheney. Cheney wanted Zubaydah to tell him what Cheney already knew: the Saddam-Qaeda connection. That would sure foil those pantywaist liberals in the State Department, the Congress and the press who kept asking for proof - as if proof were needed in such an emergency. And so Zubaydah was strapped to a waterboard to force a fake casus belli out of him. Here is the relevant section from the Bybee memo:

The interrogation team is certain that he has additional information that he refuses to divulge. Specifically, he is withholding information regarding terrorist networks in the United States or in Saudi Arabia and information regarding plans to conduct attacks within the United States or against our interests overseas.

But those in the "interrogation team" had no such certainty, according to Ali Soufan, who was part of it. And David Rose subsequently discovered what Bush and Cheney got out of the torture session, once the professional interrogators had been ushered out:

Rose quotes a Pentagon analyst who read the transcripts from the interrogation: “Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and Al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.” That analyst did not then know that the evidence was procured through torture. “As soon as I learnt that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done,” the analyst says.

We still have memos and a bureaucratic paper trail. But we don't have the tapes of those torture sessions which were destroyed - yes this is a Hollywood movie - by the CIA. And as for al-Libi, a man who could also flesh out the details of his torture and what Cheney forced him to say ... well, for a long time, he simply went missing:

"I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. "He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war."

Yesterday, he was found dead in a Libyan jail, an apparent "suicide".