Now that more details are trickling out, it’s all starting to make sense. It appears as if torture was used in an attempt to extract information that would tie Al Qaeda to Iraq in order to justify the invasion.
Of course, there was no link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, which probably explains why people like KSM had to be waterboarded 180+ times. I wonder if these guys figured that if they pushed hard enough that he would say anything, even that he was buddies with Saddam? That break would certainly justify the invasion in the minds of the administration and almost certainly in the majority of the US public. “See, we had to go into Iraq… to get Al Qaeda. Remember 9-11?”
Paul Krugman said it well:
Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
Apparently the ‘success’ claimed by torture backers had to do with figuring out the power structure of Al Qaeda rather than any sort of pending attack upon America.
I just wish they’d release all of the info so that we can let the chips fall where they may.
Do any of these new details change anyones positions on torture? I suppose you could have different answers for both this specific case and torture in general.
I also wonder if the ‘do not prosecute’ crowd would have had the same argument in regards to the Japanese we executed following WWII for waterboarding American POWs.
