Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and a long-time military man, has some choice comments on the unfolding torture story in the Washington Note. Among the nuggets:
-- The Cheney/Bushit Assministration authorized torture techniques well before the memo from the Justice Department providing legal cover;
-- Some of the torture was aimed not at finding out al Qaeda's plans, but at trying to coerce false confessions about a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, which later proved to be false, but which were important to Dumbya's rationale for war against Iraq, along with the false intelligence about WMD.
As this story develops, it's going to lead eventually to an examination of the last Administration's push to go to war against Iraq, and the half-truths and lies it used.
