econtalk

The real reason to torture?

I must confess that my posting on 100 days seems to be too wishy-washy about motives of the Bush-Cheney team relative to the Iraq war. I said “I could, however, believe that Cheney and company deliberately made us believe that the Iraqi threat was much larger than it was just to gain support for going to war in the first place.” Well “could” is not right. I DO believe that, but there is new (at least to me) evidence tying this ruse to the “torture memos”. I was mistaken about the motives for the extreme interogation measures used by the Bush-Cheney team. I had assumed it was panic over possible future attacks, though panic obviously is not a good basis for sound judgments.

Meanwhile, says NYT columnist Rich there is evidence the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees of another motivation for Bybee to write his memo in August 2002. Remember this report was signed by ALL Armed Service Committee members, including McCain, Warner and Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman. The report found that a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002,said “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful”, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

So this was not a “Jack Bauer” moment, when a bomb was ticking and extreme measures were the only way to save the world. The tick-tock was the Bush administration’s timetable for selling the war in Iraq and getting Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. This sounds incredible, but remember the way water-boarding and similar measures were used on US prisoners of war and most other tyrannical governments from the Middle Ages on was not to find the truth but rather to extract confessions that could be used as propaganda or to defame the prisoners. So these methods, while not so good for finding out useful intelligence, were more likely used to extract false information that could be used to link Iraq to Al Qaeda.

Sacrificing our cherished values as the “good guys” and our long standing reputation in the world for cheap excuses to go to war??? Incredible!!

posted by econtalk @ 9:50 PM