* they lied about supposed Saddam-al Qaeda links, and they lied about anthrax in Iraq (4-22-09)

Jonathan Landay writes in McClatchy Newspapers (4/22/09) …

• 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.
• Bush and his top lieutenants charged that Saddam was secretly pursuing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in defiance of a United Nations ban, and had to be overthrown because he might provide them to al Qaida for an attack on the U.S. or its allies.
• In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.
• … “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.
• “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.”
• “I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”

LMW COMMENT … There is much evidence to prove that George Bush and Dick Cheney were intent on invading Iraq before the 9/11 attacks. After the 9/11 attacks, they were desperate to find reasons to justify their already planned invasion. When the reasons did not exist, they made them up. After 9/11, they lied that there were links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. After the anthrax attacks, they lied that there was anthrax in Iraq and that Saddam had the means to deliver biological weapons to the U.S. And they used torture to try to develop evidence that didn’t exist. For this, over 3,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives. It is impossible for me to express my revulsion at the despicable manner in which Bush and Cheney acted, although I tried in my novel CASE CLOSED, to be published in the summer of 2009.

Read the entire article at … http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html