For The Want Of A Lie ...

It was clear, to a vast many, the lies told, repeatedly, and often, to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

However, it is now coming out, the yeoman's work The Bush Grindhouse (and in particular, the sadists, Rumsfeld and Cheney) went to build a foundation for those lies.

They created, endorsed, and pushed, a Torture Program.



Jonathan Landy, of the McClatchy Newspapers (one of the very, very few news organizations, that didn't drink the Kool-Aid, and were like dogs-on-a-bone as to The Bush Grindhouse) has the narrative today.

Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link

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

[Snip]

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

[Snip]

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

[Snip]

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

[Snip]

The report, the executive summary of which was released in November, found that Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other former senior Bush administration officials were responsible for the abusive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And, as to this Torture Program, is their classic Keystone Cops mindset, it came out yesterday, that no one in the Bush Grindhouse checked to see if such practices were effective, let alone, legal.

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

Hollywood would be hard pressed to write a comedy script of this magnitude.

A H/T to Larisa Alexandrovna, who included in her post;

The public is not stupid (unless you count those who are hooked into an IV drip of Fox News and worship Dick Cheney as a hero) and they are beginning to see just the level of criminality the Bush junta engaged in. If Congress and AG Eric Holder do not act, I fear pitchforks will be the only path people see as viable - because it will in fact be the only path left. Know your history and understand that as things build and build, and horror drips and drips into the psyche of the populace, a small, seemingly inconsequential spark can ignite this entire powder keg. I am hoping Mr. Holder will act to make clear to the public that he is in fact on the side of justice and an independent broker on behalf of the law.

My other concern is that Bush and Cheney will use every tool at their disposal to exploit these tensions and set off this powder keg. They don't care about this nation and they will burn it down if they have to in order to escape punishment. Something very bad is brewing and if justice is not swift, the time purchased by these people is enough for them to manipulate and distort, even to create their very own and very dangerous distraction.

Yes, the ball is, very much, in Attorney General Eric Holder's court.

And, it will remain, to be seen, whether we see courage, or just another succession of Crony Generals.

As a side note, yesterday, cable news was dominated by the spigot of flooding torture news, segment-after-segment, a bevy of talking heads (and yes, the old,stale, one Democrat, one Republican format) and, as we were watching MSNBC, not one person, not the anchors, not the talking heads, as they droned on-and-on, mentioned, or discussed, that the United States is required, is obligated, by way of the treaties we have signed, to investigate the War Crimes of Torture.

It's almost as if they all never heard of Jonathan Turley.

Countdown- Jonathan Turley and Bush Admin War Crimes



Yes, it is one of those times, again ...

Help Me Mr. Wizard!


Bonus Links

Harsh Methods Approved as Early as Summer 2002 ... Holder Declassifies Timeline of Actions by Top Bush Administration Officials Regarding Interrogation

dday: Building A Fact Pattern

Anonymous Liberal: No One Could Have Predicted...

Amanda Terkel: Torture architect John Rizzo is still serving as the CIA's acting general counsel

Meteor Blades: Rumsfeld Began Post-9/11 Torture Long Before Abu Ghraib

BJ Bjornson: How Many American Lives Were Lost Because of Torture?