I want to return for a moment to Adam's point on the use of torture to ferret out a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. What fascinates me is the irrelevance of the line of inquiry; despite the fact that no evidence of a link was ever found, we still invaded Iraq. Jonathan Landay:
A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.Rumsfeld and Cheney believed finding the link was so important that they insisted that CIA interrogators continue to torture suspects that had, by all available evidence, already given up any information that they had. But when the torture failed to produce the information that Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted, policy wasn't changed; they still insisted on the existence of the link, and they still pressed to invade Iraq."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."
This has a couple of interesting implications. The first is that the information that they were trying to get doesn't appear to have been that critical at all. Nothing that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could have said under torture, apparently, would have dissuaded the United States from invading Iraq, or Cheney and Rumsfeld from believing in the link. Thus, the suspects were being tortured for information that would not have affected either US policy or the beliefs of senior US officials in the slightest. The CIA might as well have been asking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to solve Fermat's Last Theorem, for all the relevance that the information had. The second implication is that Cheney and Rumsfeld didn't believe that the torture was working. If anyone were aware of an operational link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, it would have been Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but the fact that he failed to confess to any such link under prolonged torture didn't convince senior Bush administration officials that no link existed. Cheney and Rumsfeld chose to believe that the torture itself had failed to produce the relevant information, rather than that the relevant information didn't exist.
In other words, Cheney and Rumsfeld insisted on torturing people in order to get information that didn't matter, then implicitly rejected the idea that torture works when it produced the wrong answer. I'm all out of outrage; what's left is just grim fascination.
--Robert Farley
