Cheney Didn't Even Torture for Right Reasons

VP wanted to link Iraq and al-Qaeda, not stop next attack: Powell aide
By Will McCahill,  Newser Staff
Posted May 15, 2009 11:40 AM CDT
Cheney Didn't Even Torture for Right Reasons
"Those 200,000 troops" Cheney sent abroad "present a far more lucrative and close proximity target for al-Qaeda than the United States homeland," Wilkerson writes.   (Flickr)

The interrogation methods Dick Cheney so highly touts were put in place in 2002 not to prevent another terror attack, a former aide to Colin Powell writes in the Washington Note, but to dig up an Iraq-al-Qaeda connection to justify going to war. And it was Cheney himself, “frightened” by the Abu Ghraib scandal, who stopped the methods he accuses President Obama of discarding at the expense of US security, Lawrence Wilkerson adds.

After interrogators recommended that one detainee undergo no further torture, Wilkerson writes, Cheney’s office ordered waterboarding to continue anyway, until the man confessed to an Iraq-al-Qaeda connection that didn’t exist. So effective were Cheney’s pet tortures, in fact, that more Americans were killed by terrorists under his watch than under any previous administration—due in no small part to Cheney's having put them in harm’s way in Iraq.
(More Dick Cheney stories.)

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