On Wednesday, Ron Suskind told Rachel Maddow (h/t Digby):
And what‘s fascinating here, if you run the timeline side by side, you see, really, for the first time from that report that the key thing being sent down in terms of the request by the policymakers, by the White House, is find a link between Saddam and al Qaeda so that we essentially can link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks and then march into Iraq with the anger of 9/11 behind us. That was the goal and that was being passed down as the directive...
My question, the question for investigators now: Is how many of these interrogations were driven specifically by a desire to come up with the Saddam/al Qaeda link? It‘s essentially rivers coming together.
Perhaps it's time to call it the Iraq-Torture Scandal.
This is obviously a variation on the infamous Iran-Contra Scandal, the Reagan scandal centered on the illegal sale of U.S. weapons to Iran for cash and hostages to illegally fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
Iran-Contra was complicated. There were two full-fledged scandals that appeared to be separate - the illegal arms sale to Iran and the illegal funding of the Contras. What made it a mega-scandal was that the two scandals were directly connected.
And that appears to be exactly the case now. There are two full-fledged scandals: the illegal torture of "war on terror" prisoners starting in 2002 and the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. These two scandals seem to be separate, but there is growing evidence the two were directly connected.
The key question is: were Abu Zubaydah (AZ) and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (KSM) tortured to produce the truth about Al Qaeda - or lies about Iraq that Bush could use as a pretext to invade for other purposes?
Keith Olbermann is leaning heavily towards the latter, and he may be right. Here's the evidence:
- The torture techniques used on AZ and KSM were copied from Chinese techniques used on U.S. prisoners during the Korean War to produce false confessions. And in fact their use on AZ and KSM mainly produced false confessions. Did the officials who approved those techniques know that was their designed purpose? Olbermann has asked that question repeatedly for the past few days.
- Invading Iraq was a top priority of Bush's national security team as early as 1998 when they formed the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).
- Bush himself began talking about Iraq at the first Cabinet meeting, which came as a shock to Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, as reported by Ron Suskind in "The Price of Loyalty."
- Immediately after the 9/11 attack, Bush harassed Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke to blame 9/11 on Iraq, even though Clarke insisted Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with it.
- In July 2002, CIA Director George Tenet told his British counterpart, Sir Richard Dearlove, the decision had been made to invade Iraq. Dearlove concluded the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." While it has always been assumed the "intelligence and facts" referred to WMD's that didn't exist, it was also true for non-existent Iraq-Al Qaeda ties.
- After Bush decided to invade Iraq, he and his administration were willing to say and do absolutely anything to justify the invasion. They deliberately lied about all kinds of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, knowing full well Iraq had absolutely nothing. They deliberately lied about Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, knowing there were absolutely none. They stole $700 million appropriated by Congress for Afghanistan to build airfields to invade Iraq. They secretly and illegally bombed Iraq shortly after and flew into Iraqi airspace repeatedly to provoke an Iraqi attack. Bush even asked Tony Blair about painting U.S. spy planes in U.N. blue and flying them into Iraqi airspace to provoke an attack on the "U.N." that would get the U.N. to change its mind and authorize a U.S.-U.K. invasion.
- Abu Zubaydah was captured on March 28, 2002, and provided accurate and useful information about Al Qaeda under standard FBI interrogation. But in August 2002, the Bush Administration approved false-confession waterboarding by the CIA, and AZ was waterboarded 83 times that month. That was exactly the moment when the White House Iraq Group led by Andy Card needed selling points for its September product rollout.
Finally, some of the same people were involved in Iran-Contra and Iraq-Torture, especially Elliott Abrams, who was convicted of lying to Congress about Iran-Contra but pardoned by George H.W. Bush. Under George W. Bush, he secretly ran Middle East policy from the bowels of the National Security Council.
The case for an Iraq-Torture Scandal is pretty strong. As the multi-faceted torture investigations proceeds, it may ultimately prove true. And that might make it by far the biggest scandal in American history.