[Pen-l] from Juan Cole: Torture and Iraq war

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

>Jonathan S. Landay at McClatchy [http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/66622.html] has discovered the real reason that Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad were tortured dozens of times in the run-up to the Iraq War. It was because Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were trying to get them to say that Saddam Hussein had operational links with al-Qaeda, so as to have a firm justification for the war.

>The US military has now combed through 6 million captured Iraqi government documents and has entirely failed to find any evidence of operational links between the secular Arab nationalist Baath Party and the radical fundamentalist al-Qaeda cult.

>The information supplied to Landay by knowledgeable insiders is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that high officials in the Bush administration personally ordered repeated torture to be employed, and that they did so for partisan political gain rather than for national security<

-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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