Former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem reports that the vice president’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner who was suspected of knowing about a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam.
Robert Windrem, who covered terrorism for NBC, reports exclusively in The Daily Beast that:
At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.
Two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard an Iraqi prisoner came from the Office of Vice President Cheney.
“To those who wanted or suspected a relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House officials] had particular interest,” Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey Group and the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, told me. So much so that the officials, according to Duelfer, inquired how the interrogation was proceeding.
In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels [not in the CIA],” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”
Duelfer will not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding, saying only: “The language I can use is what has been cleared.” In fact, two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office of Vice President Cheney. Cheney, of course, has vehemently defended waterboarding and other harsh techniques, insisting they elicited valuable intelligence and saved lives. He has also asked that several memoranda be declassified to prove his case…
Downing Street Memos, Wilson/Plame and The Original Niger ForgeriesIn the past, Olbermann has already covered the Downing Street Memos, including the one that describes Bush’s intention to invade Iraq no matter what and his willingness to stage a phony incident to justify the invasion. Thus Olbermann is quite aware of at least some of the larger framework of obsessive devotion to constructing a fabricated case no matter what. Whether he will proceed to draw that larger picture over the coming days remains to be seen.
However, at least two further connections seem obvious to make, at least in terms of demanding further examination. First is the fact that these efforts took place after the invasion of Iraq, which puts them in the same time-frame as the outing of Valerie Plame, which in turn suggests a very different larger framework for Cheney’s activities at the time than had previously ever been considered.
It had always seemed somewhat strange how wildly Cheney seemed to have over-reacted to Joe Wilson, immediately suspecting an almost Illuminati-style conspiracy against him. Sure, we knew that Cheney was almost psychotically paranoid, but why get so spectacularly bent out of shape at this point, over this issue so close on the heels of Bush’s triumphant "Mission Accomplished" moment. But, of course, if Cheney were simultaneously trying to put the finishing touches on a manufactured case for war, then the reaction to Wilson and the outing of Plame no longer seem puzzling at all. Indeed, they are exactly what we’d expect from Cheney if he were not simply sitting back in satisfaction, and scheming over who to invade next, but instead was trying to put the finishing touches on the Iraq fabrication.
The second connection that cries out for another investigative look is the origins of the Niger document forgeries, which were the impetus for Wilson’s investigations in the first place. This has never been the focus of any sort of serious attention by anyone excepts us DFHs. It would be very nice indeed to see that change, once and for all.
With President Obama doing everything short of switching parties to try to shut down any questioning of what went on during the last Administration, it seems clear that we need to mount an intense push in support of those, like Whitehouse, who still believe in the rule of law. This may well be the most important single battle of Obama’s Administration, because all other progressive hopes may very well ride on the question of whether he can be forced to abandon his fast-growing attachment to the worst aspects of Versailles, by the only means that now seems feasible, which is, quite simply, making it radioactive for him to continue doing so.
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