A disturbing revelation from the most Senate recent report goes beyond the authorization of the use of torture...to part of the motivation....to "prove" a link between al Queda and Saddam:
Quote:
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist....
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.
"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 Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.
"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html
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if that is the case, that political motivation makes the act even more egregious, IMO.
BUT....I am not ready to call for criminal investigations yet.
As to the torture memos, I would like to see the results of the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) investigation of the attorneys who drafted the memos. It was held up in the last days of the Bush administration by the AG and is now evidently in the hands of the Obama AG.
If, in fact, as reported earlier this year,
Newsweek and Newsweek, that the OPR found that the attorneys who drafted the torture memos violated professional legal standards by basing their opinions on political rather than legal considerations, then, IMO, at the very least, they should be disbarred.
At the same time, if that in fact, is the OPR finding, I think a broader inquiry should be conducted to determine if other top officials, particularly in the White House and DoD, knowingly and willfully participated in the "politicization" of these memos. (The DoJ-OPR internal investigation did not extend that far).
At some point, you have to ask, should top officials in the former Administration be above the law?