Should be our #1 Story - NYT links torture w/ fabricated Iraq war excuse!

The New York Times reported that the principal "intelligence" cherry-picked by Bush as an excuse to invade Iraq was (1) known to be unreliable as early as February 2002 and (2) obtained through torture by a witness who was willing to say just about anything we wanted to hear in order to make the torture end -- this is a new revelation. Here's an excerpt from the NYT article:

officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts...

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, made public last month unclassified passages from the February 2002 document, which said it was probable that Mr. Libi "was intentionally misleading the debriefers."

The document showed that the Defense Intelligence Agency had identified Mr. Libi as a probable fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons.

...

Mr. Libi was returned to American custody in February 2003, when he was transferred to the American detention center in Guantanamo Bay... He withdrew his claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda in January 2004, and his current location is not known.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/politics/09intel.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=6d17d434a1d2e517&hp&ex=1134104400&partner=homepage>

Please read the NYT article.

Please spread the word.

Please keep this kicked.

How about cherry picked intelligence. There was plenty of good intelligence, from many countries. The Bushies wanted to take out Iraq, and they manufactured a case to allow it.

If I could see this before the war started, just by reading newpapers and the web, what is everyone else's excuse?

Bottom line, there is none.

between Iraq and al Qaeda until Bush outsourced al-Libi's torture to Egypt in January 2002. Egypt tortured the necessary "confession" out of al-Libi to give Bush the basis to say "we have a witness who has admitted to knowledge of the Iraq-al Qaeda link." But as soon as we got that torture-induced testimony, the Defense Intelligence Agency report from February 2002 warned that al-Libi's torture-induced "confession" lacked all credibility. But Bush needed this "evidence" of a link to promote his pet-project war on Iraq so Bush ignored the February 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency report.

This story links two of Bush's greatest scandals into one great unified scandal. Not only did Bush use torture (which he has falsely denied), and not only did he manipulate the pre-war intelligence (which he has falsely denied), but he used torture to create false evidence which he used to promote the Iraq war.

THEY want -whatever those may be, to suit their purposes. Sick shit here.

fer sure

but at least he had a reason to lie

This stuff is not just sick. I'm sure there is more to it than that. Who ARE these dark prisoners being whisked out of view to secret torture dungeons in Middle Europe and points east, by George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice? Are they "terrorists," or anything even close to a definition of such--or are they personal enemies of Dick Cheney, who know about his darker activities, or enemies of Chevron and the oil cartel, or potential whistleblowers on this criminal gang, or dissenters who may have gotten caught up in some nefarious Bush Cartel plot and are "weak links" as to disclosure? WHO ARE THEY? And, WHY CAN'T WE KNOW THEIR NAMES AND THE CHARGES AGAINST THEM?

And, how many have been 'disappeared'--disposed of? tortured to death?

Bush & Co. might as well be Pinochet, or Josef Stalin, or Adolf Hitler.

One can only imagine who they consider "enemies." I don't for one minute believe that ANYTHING they do has any relationship to the security and safety of the American people. So, WHO are they torturing, and why?

I never thought of them as "enemies of the state" in that sense of the phrase.

Sound his name out.

-Hoot

Before:

After:

If we had a majority Party in Congress that was less interested in their personal political future and more interested in holding the Executive Branch accountable for the damage they our doing to this country, we'd be in the sentencing phase of the war crimes trial now.

The Bush administration used Mr. Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons. The fact that Mr. Libi recanted after the American invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the C.I.A. in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.

...

A classified Defense Intelligence Agency report issued in February 2002 that expressed skepticism about Mr. Libi's credibility on questions related to Iraq and Al Qaeda was based in part on the knowledge that he was no longer in American custody when he made the detailed statements, and that he might have been subjected to harsh treatment, the officials said. They said the C.I.A.'s decision to withdraw the intelligence based on Mr. Libi's claims had been made because of his later assertions, beginning in January 2004, that he had fabricated them to obtain better treatment from his captors.

...

While he made some statements about Iraq and Al Qaeda when in American custody, the officials said, it was not until after he was handed over to Egypt that he made the most specific assertions, which were later used by the Bush administration as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.

...

In statements before the war, and without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and other officials repeatedly cited the information provided by Mr. Libi as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons. Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases." The question of why the administration relied so heavily on the statements by Mr. Libi has long been a subject of contention. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, made public last month unclassified passages from the February 2002 document, which said it was probable that Mr. Libi "was intentionally misleading the debriefers." The document showed that the Defense Intelligence Agency had identified Mr. Libi as a probable fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons. Mr. Levin has since asked the agency to declassify four other intelligence reports, three of them from February 2002, to see if they also expressed skepticism about Mr. Libi's credibility.



This story is a must read: it really explains some of the key details underlying the confirmation within the Downing Street Memo that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Remember, these words from the Downing Street Memo were written in July 2002 and Bush, Cheney, and Powell knew the al-Libi's torture-induced intelligence and facts were unreliable as of February 2002 but they nevertheless cited this evidence as "credible."

This story is the American counterpart to the British Downing Street Memo.