I ask this because torture is again in the news with the nomination of Gina Haspel for head of the CIA (including her attempted withdrawal).
I also ask because in recent conversations, some friends who follow politics closely did not know part of the Bush/Cheney torture regime included torturing prisoners for the specific purpose of eliciting false information tying Osama bin Laden to Saddam to justify the invasion of Iraq.
According to the Report by the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2009:
The most severe torture sessions took place in the run-up to the war in 2003, suggesting that rather than preventing further action by al-Qaeda, the US administration was intent on justifying the invasion of Iraq. One prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, who was wrongly thought to be an al-Qaeda leader by his interrogators, was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003. The first questions asked of the latter after he was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, were all about Iraq and not about forthcoming al-Qaeda attacks, according to The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.
Senior members of the Bush administration went on pressing for the use of brutal methods amounting to torture against Iraqi prisoners taken after the invasion, trying to make them corroborate an al-Qaeda connection.*
It’s good to be reminded of the actions of Bush/Cheney when they are being retroactively normalized by the horrors of Trump. False confession torture strikes me as especially horrible because it doesn’t even have the (supposed) rationale of “ticking time bomb” torture — also not legitimate, but at least it has a (highly unlikely and immoral rationale). Or at least Jack Bauer convinced many Americans of this.
We can see why Cheney ordered false confession torture in 2003:
By the time the war started, the WMD rationale for the war should have disappeared because Saddam let UN inspectors into Iraq in late in 2002 and early 2003. Despite Bush’s lie in his memoir (“We had to go to war because Saddam kicked out the inspectors”), it was Bush who kicked out the inspectors. Why? Because he was afraid they would find nothing and he couldn’t have his war. As it turned out, the feckless media (and Democrats) failed to make this point and the march to war continued. This simple fact also should destroy any arguments blaming “bad intelligence” for pre-war reports on WMD.
When no WMD were found after the fall of Saddam, the need to prove a Saddam-bin Laden link was even more urgent — a likely reason the torture continued later in 2003.
Though the sins of Bush/Cheney were many, false confession torture is perhaps the worst. It is the Inquisition, brought to life over 500 years later. Cheney channeled Torquemada by inflicting torture — this time not for religious, but for political purposes.
One of the reasons for the rise of the far right and Trump is the failure of prior offenders to face consequences: Reagan et al for Iran-Contra; Bush/Cheney for torture, Valerie Plame, the US attorney scandal and more.
The false confession torture in the Bush/Cheney years should not be lost to American consciousness. Even though they escaped accountability, they deserve to be scorned in memory and history.
Please spread these facts.
*A report by Pro Publica stating Haspel was in command when Zubaydah was tortured was retracted when new information arose. Whether she was involved in the destruction of tapes of torture is still an open question.