Tell me lies . . . please !!

I thought I was through with the torture debates, but here's a new twist that may be important, especially as reason to prosecute higher ups.

Here's the new twist. Many who challenge the use of torture say that what it does produce is FALSE information. The torturee will say anything you want to hear to get you to stop. That's what everyone was telling Cheney, et al in 2002, but they kept demanding more. So, maybe that's what they wanted -- false information.

Remember the Downing Street memo from the head of British intelligence to Tony Blair, saying that the Bush administration was determined to go to war in Iraq and that "the intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." A week later Bybee produced the torture guidelines.

As soon as the Bybee memo "legalized" torture, Abu Zabaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002. As reported in the just released Senate Armed Services Report, an Army psychiatrist involved in the interrogation, Maj. Paul Burney, said that much of it was focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and that they were under increasing pressure to produce that intelligence.

In Sunday's New York Times, Frank Rick points out that there was a ticking bomb, but it was the Bush administration's determination to get Congress to pass a war resolution before the mid-term elections in November.

Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House's illegality.

It turns out that Zabaydah had nothing to tell them about links with Al Qaeda because they didn't exist. But Cheney had been told by his psychopathic buddy Chalabi that they did, so he was determined to get "proof" of it from this detainee. So did they finally break Zabaydah with waterboarding and get what they wanted to hear?

On September 8, 2002 Cheney told Meet the Press that there were "numerous contacts" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. And polls around that time showed a majority of American people believed that there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11. We now know there was none. It was all lies.

I think that by then Cheney didn't care whether the links were true or not. The WMB justification wasn't working out; he had to have something to use as the "smoking gun" to sell the war.

In fact, what he really wanted by then was false information. And torture is very good at getting false information, exactly what you want to hear, because that's what they will tell you to get the torture to stop.

I doubt that can be proved; but if it could, that seems to me to be grounds for criminal prosecution -- torturing prisoners to get false information for political purposes and for selling an unnecessary war to a frightened and gullible American public.

Ralph