http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/66622.html
Last updated: April 22, 2009 07:42:11 PM
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link
Jonathan S. Landay
WASHINGTON -- 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.
Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former
President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In
fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama
bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
The use of abusive interrogation -- widely considered torture -- as
part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as
the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and
President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S.
officials for approving them.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who advocated the use of
sleep deprivation, isolation and stress positions and waterboarding,
which simulates drowning, insist that they were legal.
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.
"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and
by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to
operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties
were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."
Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept
insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators
weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we
could do to get that information," he said.
<end excerpt>
Full at: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/66622.html