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Report: Questions On Qaeda-Saddam Ties Were "Among The First Presented" To KSM
A great find by the Huffington Post offers additional evidence that the Bushies used torture to try to Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda :
A line buried on page 353 of the July 2004 Select Committee on Intelligence report on pre-Iraq war intelligence reads:
CTC [Counter Terrorist Center] noted that the questions regarding al-Qaida's ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented to senior al-Qaida operational planner Khalid Shaikh Muhammad following his capture.
"Among the first presented".
Yesterday we rounded up the other evidence that torture was used to bolster the political case for war with Iraq.
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Josh
Zachary
The 'ticking time bomb' scenario NEVER made any sense - the prisoners were flown to eastern europe, flown to another place, flown to a third place, then interrogated ... why the delay, if there was urgency ?
We still hear the 'ticking time bomb' rationale ... it is nonsense.
Were there emergency squads of interrogators kept ready to fly anywhere at a moment's notice, to extract information as soon as possible ? No.
This story coming out now is much more believable.
May 15, 2009 4:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
That doesn't mean much to me. They were on the verge of invasion, or had already invaded, when those issues would have been asked (March 2003). It is justifiable to seek out info about a connection between a top AQ operative and a war front. If there were ties, the US would need to watch out for a second front attack in retaliation for the invasion.
Also, "among the first questions" means what, number 12 out of 20?
May 15, 2009 5:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Eds, that's only because you are willfully looking at this in isolation, ignoring all the other evidence that the causus belli for the Iraq invasion was manufactured by the Bush regime. Stay tuned, because the torture case is the smoking gun.
May 16, 2009 11:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
No, it means I am looking at it without prejudice.
I will note that you had only a personal attack, and did not bother to try to deal with the argument.
May 16, 2009 2:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
The experts have said that people will say ANYTHING to get the torture to stop. I think the Bushies understood this very well and were deliberately using torture to try to extract false claims of ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein when they already knew that none existed.
If they had been successful, we would have then heard wild proclamations about this connection in the same way we heard Bush make the false claim about Niger "yellow cake uranium" in his State of the Union speech.
May 16, 2009 2:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Two kinds of "success": "We got false claims, let's run with them," and "We got true claims, let's change our tactics accordingly."
Yes, people will even tell the truth to stop torture.
May 17, 2009 1:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Look, having read the above comments, it seems to come down to this: Either you support the idea of torturing a person to get information, or you don't. If you support using tortue, then that's fine, but if so, you ought to just say so. If you don't, then that's fine, but again you should just say so. Or, if you support using tortue to get some information, but not other information, you should just say that also.
I don't support using tortue and don't think it works. As Lawrence Wilkerson wrote yesterday, there are no reported cases of the U.S. using tortue since 2004, and we haven't been attacked since 2001.
Of course, here's a interesting point: How do we know that the people we may have tortured knew what we needed to know to begin with?
May 17, 2009 3:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
If there is ever a movie made that had KSM in it, Ron Jeremy would be great to play him. I can't not think about the Hedgehog when I see KSM's picture.
May 17, 2009 4:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think there's a link missing here. Has it been confirmed that KSM was tortured immediately upon capture? Abu Zubaida was questioned before being tortured, during which he apparently coughed up KSM. The fact that the Iraq - Al Qaida link was among the first raised, doesn't necessarily mean they were raised during torture.
May 18, 2009 3:55 PM | Reply | Permalink