Listening to former (Vice) President Dead Eye Dick Cheney talk, you would think that the torture program that the White House initiated late in 2001 was aimed solely at stopping future al Qaeda terrorist attacks. Not true. A report from the Senate Armed Services Committee released yesterday says that CIA and military interrogators were directed by the White House to apply torture methods to find an operational link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to help build a case for invading Iraq, even though the White House was told early on that there was no such link.
This is reminiscent of the story about neocon manipulators insisting just days after 9-11 that we had to hit Iraq, and of the Bushit Assministration's singular focus on striking Iraq, beginning with their first National Security Council meeting in January, 2001.
The mantra of the Bushies is "we were kept safe for 7 years" (of course after we were attacked on 9-11 on their watch). But they used torture methods not so much to locate the people who attacked us -- bin Laden and his lieutenants -- but to manufacture a phony case for war with Iraq. After all, by March 13, 2002 -- 6 months after 9-11 -- Dumbya was claiming he didn't care where bin Laden was: "It's not that important. It's not our priority." War with Iraq was.
