| | Cheney pushed torture techniques to find Iraq, Qaeda tie: report
At the urging of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush administration used torture techniques against suspected terrorists in part of an effort to establish a tie between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, according to a report Wednesday.
"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," McClatchy Newspaper's Jonathan Landay writes.
"Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003," he adds. "No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime."
The push apparently came from Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who were adamant about making a connection, McClatchy Newspaper's Jonathan Landy writes.
"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," Landay says, but a former senior 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 is quoted as saying.
"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11)," the official adds. "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 in this period that the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubeida at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times.
"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," the senior official continued.
The full story is available here.
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