One critical piece of information in the torture timeline is that illegal techniques were not used after Bush's reelection. This is important, not merely because it rebuts the argument from Dick Cheney that Obama shutting down waterboarding etc. will endanger the nation and embolden terrorists. If that's the case, then Cheney acted no better during the last four years of the Bush administration. So why the change in policy? Because before 2005, Cheney needed evidence to justify the Iraq war, says Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff of the Department of State during the term of Secretary of State Colin Powell:
Likewise, 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.
The mounting evidence that torture was used to find information to support the Iraq war, combined with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's claims today that the CIA misled Democrats about the application of torture is a double whammy. Torture as a casus belli and the nation's chief intelligence agency lying to a leader of the opposition party are two major themes that are converging. This is too big to ignore.
