Figures

Back when the debate over whether or not we should go to war in Iraq was hot and heavy, I had a series of arguments with a cousin of mine who lives in DC. He was still greatly disturbed by 9-11 and so he wanted some revenge which I believe clouded his better judgement. He was all for going to war in Iraq so I tried to use logic and the facts that were knows at the time to convince him that he was wrong. My main selling point was that we already had UN weapons inspectors there. If we were really so sure he had WMDs why not just let them do their job and then when and if they found anything take appropriate actions then. Why in the hell were we trying to rush the very people who could verify the "intelligence" we had, out of the damn country before they were done and before they had found anything?

Well his big point always came back to the fact that Saddam Hussein was always denying access to the weapons inspectors and playing games with the process.

Now honestly I didn't have any kind of special insight to Middle Eastern foreign policy at the time. But I did have a healthy dose of common sense and a map. It seemed obvious to me that Saddam knew that after we kicked his ass in 91 he would probably look quite vulernable to his neihbors in the region. Iraq also isn't the biggest country in that area either when you look at it on the map. So it would make perfect sense as a deterrent to make it seem as if at the least he MIGHT have WMDs. After what went down with the Iran/Iraq war where he used chemical and biological weapons on the Iranian forces, I was pretty sure that just the thought the he might do that type of thing again was a good deterrent to any country who might be considering an attack.

Now unfortuanately at the time my cousin didn't buy my argument (he has since apologized to me) and it was moot anyway because BushCo was bound and determined to go to war.

But at least now I know that I was pretty much right with my assessment.

Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday.

Now obviously that could have just been Saddam posturing, but really he knew at that point he had nothing else to lose. But of course its all moot now when it boils down to it isn't it?

Never Again!

The "Ticking Time Bomb" Was Iraq?

McClatchy has an article based on the newly released Senate Armed Services report on torture in GITMO, Afghanistan and Iraq that probably explains why KSM and Zubaydah were waterboarded so many times. It turns out that at least part of the reason Dick Cheney and Dick Rumsfeld pushed for torture was an attmept to get detainees to verify a link between Iraq and al Qaida that never existed.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation and stress positions and waterboarding, which simulates drowning, insist that they were legal.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubeida at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

Like Nostradamus

Over at FireDogLake emptywheel has a post up about the Bush Department of Justice's decision not to prosecute White House Chief of Staff Andy Card's cousin for acting as an agent of Iraq before we started the war. Now I kinda figured that this post was just another in a long line exposing the cronyism inherent with President Bush's administration. But as I usually do I ended up clicking through the links and I ended up reading the letter that Card's cousin, Susan Lindauer, wrote to Card and Secretary of State Colin Powell that got her in trouble in the first place. Emptywheel's post in and of itself is an interesting read and you should definitely check it out, but I think what Lindauer writes in the letter about the prospects of negotiating with Saddam to avoid the war as well as her predicitions about what would happen in the aftermath is a must read. I wish I could excerpt it here but its not set up in that kind of format as it was scanned into a pdf instead of being typed in. For that reason I am asking that you click the link and read her letter. I think you will thank emptywheel for providing this info if you hadn't already heard about it like I hadn't.