Cheney & Rummie pushed for it

Friends -- anyone who is tired of my ranting about our torture program might want to come back later. It just won't go away, and I think it needs to be thoroughly exposed.

I can see Obama's point about an investigation being a distraction and perhaps preventing passage of his major agenda. He has to make that call for his administration, considering everything. But we can still push for full exposure. If the DoJ won't do it, and if he leans on Congress not to do it, then a lot can still be done by investigative journalists. There are a few left, and some of the independent internet bloggers are filling in the gaps quite nicely, thank you.

And there is still the McClatchy news service, which has provided some of the best coverage of issues that don't get much attention from the main stream media. Here are some excerpts from an important article from them written by Jonathan Landay:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the 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 Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 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.

This was corraborated by a former Army psychiatrist, Major Charles Burney, who told Army investigators in 2006

that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/v-print/story/66622.html

I think this speaks for itself. It is consistent with everything we know about Cheney's and Rummie's persistent harassment to get info to back up what they already have decided. And it helps explain Cheney's desperate attempt to create a PR fog by criticizing Obama's handling of the whole issue.

Ralph