Qaddafi, Bush and the Cover-Up Of The True Path To War In Iraq

[kpete]

Qaddafi, Bush and the Iraq Big Lie

Friday 25 February 2011

by: Russ Baker | WhoWhatWhy.com | Report

While the US government expresses outrage over the brutality of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi toward his own people, we’re missing a complex but significant wrinkle that ties Qaddafi to America’s cover-up of the true path to war in Iraq.

In May, 2009, a man named Ibn Shaikh al-Libi supposedly committed suicide while being held in a Libyan jail. Al-Libi is a deeply, deeply interesting fellow. Back in 2002, he was tortured by Egypt under US direction. It appears that the reason the US government had him tortured was not to stop some imminent attack on the United States, but to generate alleged—and false— links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could justify invading Iraq.

....................

Nick Baumann wrote about it in 2009 in Mother Jones:
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2009/05/al-libi-torture-and-case-war-iraq

Al-Libi was the man whose false confession, obtained under torture, of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda provided the Bush administration with its casus belli for war with Iraq. It didn’t seem to matter that al-Libi’s claim that Bin Laden had sent operatives to be trained in the use of weapons of mass destruction by Hussein’s people didn’t make any sense. “They were killing me,” al-Libi later told the FBI about his torturers. “I had to tell them something.” A bipartisan Senate Intelligence committee report would later conclude that al-Libi lied about the link “to avoid torture.”

............

Thus, the fact that he suddenly “killed himself” while being held by Qaddafi’s police state at least raises the question of whether Qaddafi was doing a favor for the US. Of course, by 2009, when al-Libi suddenly died, Obama had become president—but it’s safe to say that deep, covert cleanup operations don’t end with an inauguration.

more:
http://www.truth-out.org/qaddafi-bush-and-iraq-big-lie68069?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TRUTHOUT+%28t+r+u+t+h+o+u+t+|+News+Politics%29

[felix_numinous]

1. K & R we certainly have a lot of house cleaning

to do in this country- as we know dirt just attracts more dirt, corruption just makes more corruption.

[JohnyCanuck]

2. K&R n/t

[social_critic]

3. Baloney

The case for the invasion wasn't made by torturing a guy. It was made by faking information in the Pentagon, and using close liason with media types such as Judith Miller at the New York Times. The guy who was in charge of the faking was Abram N. Shulsky. He was a member of the policy planning staff in the office of the Secretary of Defense, specifically the OSP.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jul/17/iraq.usa

Quoting from the Guardian article:

"The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney."

Mr Shulsky is a Richard Perle protege. He used to be a senior fellow at the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) in Washington, D.C., wrote the book "Silent Warfare".

To track the movement to war in Iraq, it's important to read some of the original source documents. I find this one to be particularly useful:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

[azul]

4. Ah, but do you recall the man who sold the war?

Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
by James Bamford

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1118-10.htm


Almost made into a movie staring Michael Douglass in 2007, but axed for being not quite fit for prime time.

[starroute]

6. Not baloney at all

They were desperately looking for solid evidence to justify an invasion up until the last minute, when they were repeatedly waterboarding KSM. They kept coming up with new lies -- the aluminum rods, the Niger forgeries -- that kept getting shot down. The al-Libi one simply happened to last longer than most.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/138625/the_stomach-turning_truth_about_bush%27s_torture_programs/?page=2

The push for application of torture techniques occurred as the Bush administration scrambled to come up with evidence to support its claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had links to Al Qaeda or was pursuing the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Two major spikes in the use of the harshest techniques occurred in the weeks just before the Iraq invasion and the couple of months after the occupation of Iraq had begun. The first spike coincides with a period of difficulty with America’s principal ally, Britain, shortly following the famous Washington meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in which the latter expressed concern about the lack of evidence supporting claims about a WMD program. Blair had been informed by his attorney general, Lord Peter Goldsmith, that the legal case for invading Iraq was exceedingly tenuous and badly needed to be bolstered with evidence showing an imminent threat coming out of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Also in this period, Vice President Cheney was doing his best to make this case by talking up evidence that proved specious—including reports of a meeting in Prague between an Al Qaeda figure and an Iraqi diplomat. . . .

In the end, Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent to the United Nations to make the case for an invasion of Iraq. The crown jewel of his evidentiary case turned on claims supplied by Ibn al-Shaykh Al-Libi that Saddam Hussein had trained Al Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical weapons. Al-Libi had been tortured using the new techniques to secure this evidence. It was subsequently determined to be false—offered up by Al-Libi to escape the torments to which he was subjected with the full understanding that this was what his interrogators wanted to hear.

[social_critic]

7. But the case for war was orchestrated in the Pentagon by Shulsky

All of these pieces had to be fit into a coherent lie. I was aware they were lies at the time, so I focused on watching how the lies were pieced together. And the trail always leads back to the Wolfowitz connection and the OSP.

Shulsky, by the way, wrote his PhD thesis at the University of Chicago on deception techniques. I really can't say everything I know, because it could get me in trouble.

[starroute]

8. Perhaps you and I are looking at it from different angles

I did a timeline a couple of years ago, and the sense I got was that in 2002-03 they kept trying out one story after another and having them all shot down -- and that the points at which they were torturing people were exactly when none of the stories were panning out.

The propaganda campaign to convince Americans that Saddam had to be taken out was the easy part -- because Americans will believe anything. But they also had to convince the British government and the United Nations that they had a legitimate casus belli, and that wasn't nearly as simple.

[peacetalksforall]

5. Thanks for the refreshers and new stuff in the op and posts..