The Washington Post says today that the Obama administration is about to release the declassified 2004 report from the CIA Inspector General and that it "will almost certainly disprove claims that waterboarding was only used in controlled circumstances with effective results."
But, even before that report -- dubbed "the Holy Grail" by insiders, because of its supposedly being the long-sought answer to it all -- there is evidence in a footnote to the recently released 2005 Office of Legal Council memos, as discovered by one of the investigative bloggers.
The memo states that medical personnel protested the use of the waterboard in that form, stressing that "there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe.'"
Apparently, Dick Cheney has been trying to shape public opinion before these reports are released, because then it will be too late to write history to his liking. It's already appearing that it's not that Obama's release of the reports is making the country less safe, but that it is exposing the results of mendacity in the bush administration, probably with cheney being the mastermind and enforcer.
Remember, it was he who said right after 9/11 that we would "have to go over to the dark side" to keep the country safe.
Ralph
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More and more people are picking up the thread that the main purpose in the use of waterboarding in the summer of 2002 was to extract information about a link between Saddaam and Al Qaeda to bolster bush's selling of the invasion of Iraq to Congress before the mid-term elections in Nov 2002.
ReplyDeleteAnd that motive does seem to make the most sense of the pieces of information we have.
It also explains why cheney is so adamantly trying to sell his version of the torture debate.