Was al-Libi Tortured So Bush Could Invade Iraq?
Submitted by Bob Fertik on May 12, 2009 - 7:51pm.
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an little-known man who died mysteriously in a Libyan prison, has a crucial place in world history.
Without his tortured false confession of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, the U.S. might never have invaded Iraq.His death leaves behind a question of historic proportions: was there
a secret plan at the highest levels of the Bush Administration to extract his false confession in order to manufacture propaganda for a disastrous war?......................
Thanks to Richard Clarke, we know Bush began pushing hard for links between Iraq and al Qaeda immediately after the 9/11 attack.
al-Libi was the first al Qaeda member captured after 9/11, so he had enormous value to everyone in the government who was trying to find and destroy al Qaeda. But he also had enormous value to Bush and the Neocons who wanted an excuse to invade Iraq.
more:
http://www.democrats.com/was-al-libi-tortured-so-bush-could-invade-iraq JUST NOW FROM SCOTT HORTON:The torture of al-Libi in the hands of Egyptian CIA proxies occurred during the peak period of use of Bush era torture techniques, according to information recently revealed by the Senate Armed Services Committee. This “torture surge” occurred
under pressure from Vice President Richard B. Cheney, as part of a concerted effort to collect evidence of a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda-linked terrorist organizations. No such relationship ever existed, but even today you won’t hear Dick Cheney acknowledge this. The al-Libi case raises the question of whether the aim was to “gather” intelligence or to “concoct” it.
Al-Libi could have been a star witness in a case against those who built the bogus case for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the Bush Administration has long been eager to have him disappear.When,
in September 2006, President Bush ordered the transfer of the “worst of the worst” terrorist detainees from CIA black sites to Guantánamo, al-Libi was nowhere to be found. Why? Al-Libi had great potential to embarrass the CIA and the Bush White House. The Bush Administration wanted him out of sight. They accomplished that, in the first instance, by turning him over to Libyan authorities, who subjected him to a pseudo-trial and locked him away for what turned out to be a life sentence.
more at:
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/hbc-90004954