Over at The Washington Note, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, claims that the main purpose of torture in the months immediately after 9/11 was to find a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein:
What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion — its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.
So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case. But one way or another, Wilkerson is going to have to tell us how he knows this. It’s not enough just to say that he “learned” it.
