Terrace Agenda

Quickly:

Lost in the discussion (that I’m not interested in having) about whether or not torture is effective are the reports that much of the Bush administration’s use of torture occurred because they were trying to get “evidence” to bolster their case that Iraq was linked to al-Qaida.

McClatchy:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

In this sense, we can say that the torture was very effective, as false links between Iraq and al-Qaida were asserted by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi following his rendition and torture in Egypt.

The administration got exactly the false information it wanted. Strangely, when this McClatchy story first came out, I saw nearly every journalist, even those who seem to be willing to take a few chances, shake their heads and dismiss as too cynical the notion that maybe the administration was looking for exactly what they got when they had al-Libi tortured, and tortured him for that specific purpose. I just don’t see how we can dismiss anything as too cynical when we’re talking about an American government that promotes torture. Why shouldn’t we believe that they were trying to get false information? What is it that they’ve done that should make us trust that they had good intentions in any way?

For his part, al-Libi was found dead a few days ago in a secret Libyan prison, supposedly of suicide. Obviously, we have no way of knowing at this point whether he really did kill himself or not, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a man who was tortured as al-Libi was might eventually consider suicide to be a reasonable option.