It is becoming more obvious with each passing day that the "enhanced interrogaton" was an attempt to create a link between Iraq and al Qaeda where one did not exist. This seems to be the answer to the Torture Puzzle, and it seems to point directly to Dick Cheney.
Here is a quick summary of a few of the major points we know:
Dick Cheney was a charter member of the Project for the New American Century, an organization that called for "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power" in 1998. So we know Cheney wanted to oust Saddam Hussein before he was sworn as Vice President.
We know from the "Downing Street Minutes" that in July 2002, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
In July 2002, the CIA's Special Activities Division (SAD) teams entered Iraq to support that effort.
The Bybee Torture Memos were written in August 2002 to define torture to be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
In August 2002 Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times.
In September 2002, White House and Pentagon officials publicly disclose that the Department of Defense has finished a highly detailed plan for attacking Iraq that was delivered to President Bush’s desk in early September by Gen. Tommy R. Franks.
The now widely discussed "enhanced interrogation" briefing to Congressional members was made in September 2002.
Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson says
... 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.
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Another piece of the Torture Puzzle that I have not seen in recent discussions of the July 2002 - September 2002 time frame was presented in the June 20, 2006 PBS Frontline program The Dark Side.
In that program, Richard Clarke, then Director of NSC Counterterrorism, said that in the Fall/Winter of 2001, Scooter Libby grabbed him in the driveway outside of the West Wing and said "I hear you don't believe this report that Mohammed Atta was talking to Iraqi people in Prague." Clarke said he didn't believe it because it wasn't true. Libby replied, "You're wrong. You know you're wrong. Go back and find out. Look at the rest of the reports and find out that you're wrong." Clarke said he understood Libby to mean, "This is a report that we want to believe, and stop saying it's not true. It's a real problem for the vice president's office that you, the counterterrorism coordinator, are walking around saying that this isn't a true report. Shut up."
Michael Scheuer, a CIA agent at that time, said that George Tenet, "had us go back 10 years in the Agency's records and look and see what we knew about Iraq and al Qaeda. And I was available at the time and I led the effort. And we went back 10 years. We examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the line of 75,000 pages of information. And there was no connection (between Iraq and al Qaeda)."
Senator Bob Graham, Chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence at the time, asked George Tenet about the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq and was told, "We've never done a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, including its weapons of mass destruction." Graham said he was stunned, "We were flying blind ... getting ready to go to war." He insisted that a National Intelligence Estimate was essential to the decision making process. One was quickly prepared, in "just over two weeks" and delivered to Congress on October 1, 2002
According to the Frontline narrator, "Many members of the CIA believed the vice president himself was determined to control the content of the NIE. The vice president and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, had made about 10 trips to CIA headquarters, where they personally questioned analysts."
A former CIA agent, Melvin Goodman, said, "I was at the CIA for 24 years. The only time a vice president came to the CIA building was for a ceremony, to cut a ribbon, to stand on the stage, but not to harangue analysts about finished intelligence."
Another former CIA agent, Patrick Lang, said, "Many, many of them have told me they were pressured. And there are a lot of ways pressure takes a lot of forms."
Paul Pillar, the National Intelligence Officer in charge of creating the Iraq NIE, said "The questions every morning, the tasks, the requests to look into this angle one more time, turn over that rock again. If you didn't find anything last week, look again to see if there's something there for that about that connection."
Vincent Cannistraro, yet another former CIA agent, said "So you start looking very hard for anything at all that will support the answer that the vice president wants, that the Defense Department wants."
In another segment of the Frontline program, David Kay, Iraq Weapons Inspector 1991-1992 and Iraq Survey Group, 2003-2004, said:
At the time there were a lot of concerns that it (the NIE) was being politicized by certain individuals within the administration that wanted to get that intelligence base that would justify going forward with the war. (...) Some of the neocons that you refer to were determined to make sure that the intelligence was going to support the ultimate decision. Looking back on it now, as we put pieces together, it probably is apparent to some, including Paul, that it was much more politicized than in fact we realized. It wasn't a secret, though, at that time that there were certain people who were strong advocates of going to war, almost irrespective of what the intelligence was.
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Dick Cheney told the VFW National Convention on August 26, 2002:
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.
This speech was made before Scooter Libby told Richard Clarke to "Shut up," and before the National Intelligence (NIE) estimate on Iraq was prepared, and before Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney made about 10 trips to CIA headquarters to personally "harangue analysts."
This supports Lawrence Wilkerson's assertion that the administration's "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."
The evidence suggests that when Wilkerson references "the administration," he really means Dick Cheney.
I will stipulate that many people who read Daily Kos regularly already know about the Cheney Cabal actions during the summer/fall of 2002, but I think revisiting some of these events may help put a few more pieces of the torture puzzle in context.