There is much gnashing of teeth today in the blogosphere over the release of a Senate report on the genesis and potentially criminal conduct of Bush administration torture policies. But please don’t just follow the shiny torture object – look deeper – the most egregious crime was using torture as a tool to establish a false connection between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein.
The explosive results of a Senate investigation on the genesis and conduct of Bush administration torture policies were released yesterday. The report sheds a lot of light into the official decision making process to engage in interrogation techniques that very clearly cross the line to torture. In fact, the report (and analysis of the report here, here, here, and here) lays out what appears to be a compelling case for immediately convening a war crimes tribunal. Yet President Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, responding to questions this past Sunday regarding the release last week of CIA torture memos, very forcefully reiterated that the administration will not pursue prosecution of former Bush administration officials and advisers who designed and/or approved the torture programs and techniques.
Most of the punditry this morning is orbiting around the torture aspects of the congressional report. But there is a subtext to the report outside of the decision to torture that demands further exploration: the Bush administration's single-minded focus, post-9/11, to take down Saddam Hussein. While the decision to torture is certainly prosecutable, in terms of real impact, using torture to falsely make a tenuous al-Qaida connection to Saddam (and therefore justify the invasion of Iraq) is at least as egregious in scope. While hundreds, or possibly even a few thousands, of alleged "bad guys" may have been tortured by the CIA and other agencies in order to extract intel, and yes, a few might have even died in the process, untold hundreds of thousands have died or been permanently maimed during the prosecution of a war based on a mountain of lies.
In his 2004 book, Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke gave us the first glimpse into the beginnings of building this public narrative of lies and justifications for Iraq, in this exchange with George W. Bush on September 12, 2001:
"...see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred..."
"Absolutely [Mr. President], we will look...again." I was trying to be more respectful, more responsive. "But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al Qaeda, and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen."
"Look into Iraq, Saddam," the President said testily, and left us...
In August, 2006, an inquiry by the Inspector General of the Army interviewed Major Paul Burney, MD, a psychiatrist who was assigned to oversee the detainee interrogation program at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Dr. Burney testified (page 41 of the report):
(U) At the time, there was a view by some at GTMO that interrogation operations had not yielded the anticipated intelligence,290 MAJ. Burney testified to the Army IG regarding interrogations:
[T]his is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.291
(Perhaps it would be useful to investigate who the "frustrated people" were - I suspect that the names Cheney and Rumsfeld might pop up in such an investigation.)
Though it takes awhile for the report to establish a timeline for approval and implementation of torture techniques, it's clear that the ball was rolling in late 2001, when involvement by the Department of Defense's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) was requested by the DoD's Office of General Counsel. JRPA manages training for U.S. military personnel on resisting torture techniques. And the agency was now being requested to develop an interrogation process for detainees captured by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Why?
Here are a couple of reasons: 1) Detainees weren't giving up any actionable information on al Qaida. 2) Detainees weren't giving up (or making up) information that would further establish the connection between al Qaida leadership and the government of Saddam Hussein.
It did not matter that personnel assigned to JRPA characterized torture techniques as essentially useless in extracting actionable information. Very early on, JRPA was clear that using torture never resulted in extracting useful information beyond what the torturee thought interrogators wanted to hear, whether or not there was any truth to the information.
The bottom line: the whole game was initially constructed to make the linkage between bin Laden and Saddam, because U.S. intelligence could not, in the aftermath of 9/11/01, make the connection. The development of Bush administration policies on torture had very little to do with actually preventing another attack on U.S. soil.
It was always about Saddam, from the very beginning. Maybe that's where prosecutions should lead.