Dick Cheney may have used torture to try to forge a false link between Iraq and Al Queda

[BirminghamExaminer]

Excerpt:

....

If it turns out to be true that there is a connection between requests from the White House or Dick Cheney's office to waterboard prisoners in an attempt to connect Iraq with al Queda, it begs the question of why the Bush administration was so absolutely eager to go to war with Iraq. The Bush doctrine (the use of pre-emptive war) has always been puzzling. We have been told that the information provided to the White House was inaccurate. But other reports by weapons inspectors who said there were no WMDs in Iraq were ignored in favor of a pre-emptive strike on a country that was no threat to the U.S.

It is possible that the Bush administration hoped to get a false confession out of the Iraqi by waterboarding him. They had already been informed by top military leaders as well as a number of professional interrogators that torture produces false information. The Iraqi prisoner wasn't waterboarded but in 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was.

Waterboarding isn't the only method of torture used, it just happens to be the one that Dick Cheney likes to talk about the most. Could it be that Cheney is on a campaign to convince Americans that waterboarding isn't torture? And if so, is it because he is responsible for okaying that particular method of torture or that he was the one who wanted to use waterboarding to elicit information from the Iraqi and KSM hoping one of them might provide a palatable reason for the pre-emptive war with Iraq by falsely confessing to a connection between Iraq and al Queda?

Why did the Bush/Cheney administration work so hard to invade Iraq? Iraq had no connection to the 9/11 attacks but the Bush/Cheney administration actively encouraged Americans to believe that there was a connection. President Bush openly admits that he was disappointed there were no weapons of mass destruction. Was he disappointed too that there was no connection between Iraq and al Queda?

Dick Cheney left the Department of Defense in 1995 to become the CEO of Halliburton Co. one of the biggest oil-services companies in the world. Under his leadership, Halliburton got $2.3 billion in U.S. government contracts and that was only the beginning. When he became Vice-President under George W. Bush, Cheney ostensibly severed ties with Halliburton. By then, Halliburton was the world's largest diversified energy services, engineering, construction and maintenance company (2000).

Halliburton is the parent company of KBR, the major contractor for warmongering in Iraq, the same KBR that built faulty showers that have killed several American troops. Despite the fact that KBR had defrauded the government in the mid-1990s, it was able to secure a 10 year contract with the Pentagon to provide services to the U.S. Army and is still building faulty showers that are electrocuting American troops in Iraq today.
In 2003, a CBS report revealed that Cheney still had ties to Halliburton. Is it possible that Dick Cheney's ties to Halliburton and hence KBR are what motivated him to push for a war in Iraq and subsequently to push for torture?

To read the entire article and see the videos of Rachel Maddow interviewing Robert Windrem and Charles Duelfer, go here.

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. I was just reading this related story:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051103412.html

"I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. "He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war."

[lamp_shade]

2. What amazes me is that this just hit the MSM yesterday. We've ( DU) known about this for weeks.