http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090521_cheney_and_the_iraq-torture_link/Cheney and the Iraq-Torture Link
Posted on May 21, 2009
By Joe Conason
snip//
Despite the expected denials of such gross misconduct emanating from the intelligence community, some of the most damning evidence came from Mr. Cheney’s own mouth. Back in 2004, according to the McClatchy Newspapers, he boasted to the Rocky Mountain News (a Denver daily that has since ceased publishing) that the fruits of interrogation had vindicated him.
When a Rocky Mountain News reporter asked whether he still stood by earlier statements linking Saddam to the terrorist perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, despite demurrals from Mr. Powell, Mr. Cheney replied: “We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al-Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in ... chemical and biological weapons technology.” He went on to predict that when all of the Saddam regime’s records were examined, there would be “ample evidence confirming the link.”
Five years later, there is still no evidence confirming the link. There is persuasive evidence, however, that Gitmo prisoners were tortured on orders from the Bush White House, where Mr. Cheney commandeered authority on such matters. Former U.S. Army psychiatrist Maj. Charles Burney told Army investigators in 2006 that he and other interrogators at the detainee camp had been ordered to focus on a certain topic, without success, despite resorting to those “enhanced” techniques.
“While we were there, a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaida and Iraq, and we were not successful in establishing a link between al-Qaida and Iraq,” Major Burney testified.
As Mr. Cheney no doubt knows, prisoners enduring torture can be induced to say almost anything to ease their pain and fear. American Special Forces are trained to resist those ugly methods precisely because they have been used by totalitarian regimes to extract false confessions for centuries.
It is hard to imagine anything more disturbing than the use of torture by the U.S. government in seeking to justify an aggressive and unjustified war, which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Now we need to know whether those awful offenses were perpetrated on Mr. Cheney’s watch—by fully empowering a truth commission to take testimony from him and his associates under oath.
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