New report: Bush admin. was determined to torture

New report: Bush admin. was determined to torture

by Joe Sudbay (DC) on 4/22/2009 08:52:00 AM

Last week, the Obama administration released the Bush administration's legal memos, which authorized torture. This week, we've got a new Senate report on the subject of torture. It's still somewhat sad and extremely disturbing that we're talking about the United States of America permitting torture. But, that's what George Bush did to our country. My initial take on the Senate report on torture is that it confrms the Bush crew was hellbent on torturing any suspected terrorist -- even if it wasn't legal and didn't work. From the Washington Post:Intelligence and military officials under the Bush administration began preparing to conduct harsh interrogations long before they were granted legal approval to use such methods -- and weeks before the CIA captured its first high-ranking terrorism suspect, Senate investigators have concluded.


HULLABALOO DIGBY
A report by the Senate Armed Services Committee released Tuesday night says that torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib prison and approved by officials in the George W. Bush administration were applied only after soliciting a “wish list” from interrogators.

DAILYKOS:

Bush Administration Pushed Torture In Attempt To Find Iraq-al Qaida Links

by Hunter

Wed Apr 22, 2009 at 07:20:08 AM PDT

This story is almost unimaginably repulsive.

McClatchy reports that one of the prime pressures that led to using torture as an "interrogation technique" was the prewar effort to find "links" between al Qaida and Iraq -- links which the intelligence community already were confident did not exist:

A former senior U.S. 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 said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). 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 during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubeida at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document. [...]

Report links CIA to military harsh interrogations

AP – 1 hr 26 mins ago

WASHINGTON – The brutal treatment of prisoners by the military at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and Afghanistan was systematic and a direct result of the CIA's early use of harsh interrogation tactics, according to a Senate report. Full Story»