Twenty Years Ago: How Powell Used Tortured "Evidence" for War Against Iraq

The US outsourcing torture to Egypt to get the false "evidence" for war highlights how torture actually does work. The target, al-Libi, would be "suicided" by Gaddafi before the US also turned on him

Twenty years ago, Colin Powell gave the fabricated case for the Iraq invasion to the UN. The "evidence" for the claim that Iraq was linked to al Qaeda was false -- and tortured out of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. I questioned Powell about this in 2009:

Sam Husseini: General, can you talk about the al-Libi case and the link between torture and the production of tortured evidence for war?

Colin Powell: I don’t have any details on the al-Libi case.

SH: Can you tell us when you learned that some of the evidence that you used in front of the UN was based on torture? When did you learn that?

CP: I don’t know that. I don’t know what information you’re referring to. So I can’t answer.

SH: Your chief of staff, Wilkerson, has written about this.

CP: So what? [inaudible]

SH: So you’d think you’d know about it.

CP: The information I presented to the UN was vetted by the CIA. Every word came from the CIA and they stood behind all that information. I don’t know that any of them believe that torture was involved. I don’t know that in fact. A lot of speculation, particularly by people who never attended any of these meetings, but I’m not aware of it.

But there’s no speculation. My questioning was based on statements by Larry Wilkerson, Powell’s Chief of Staff, who was in the room, which I summarize here.

This issue of torture yielding useful but false information was hardly unforeseeable. Professor As'ad AbuKhalil appeared on a news release I assembled the day after Powell's notorious UN speech: "The Arab media is reporting that the Zakawi story was provided by Jordanian intelligence, which has a record of torture and inaccuracy." 

The al-Libi story was buried in Footnote 857 of the 2015 Senate torture report. He was captured by the US in Afghanistan -- then the CIA rendered him to Egypt, in effect outsourcing their torture to get a false confession to fabricate the tortured case for war. He would later say he was tortured into falsely saying that Iraq was helping al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons:

Exploiting false information has been well understood within the government. Here's a 2002 memo from the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency to the Pentagon's top lawyer -- it debunks the "ticking time bomb" scenario and acknowledged how false information derived from torture can be useful:

"The requirement to obtain information from an uncooperative source as quickly as possible -- in time to prevent, for example, an impending terrorist attack that could result in loss of life -- has been forwarded as a compelling argument for the use of torture. ... The error inherent in this line of thinking is the assumption that, through torture, the interrogator can extract reliable and accurate intelligence. History and a consideration of human behavior would appear to refute this assumption." The document concludes: "The application of extreme physical and/or psychological duress (torture) has some serious operational deficits, most notably, the potential to result in unreliable information. This is not to say that the manipulation of the subject's environment in an effort to dislocate their expectations and induce emotional responses is not effective. On the contrary, systematic manipulation of the subject's environment is likely to result in a subject that can be exploited for intelligence information and other national strategic concerns." [PDF]

So torture can result in the subject being "exploited" for various propaganda and strategic concerns. This memo should be well known but isn't, largely because the two reporters for the Washington Post, Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, who wrote about it in 2009 managed to avoid the most crucial part of it in their story, as Jeff Kaye, a psychologist active in the anti-torture movement, has noted. 

But the al-Libi story gets even worse. First off, al-Libi had initially cooperated with FBI officials when he was first questioned by them, giving them true and useful information without being tortured. Secondly, he was tortured by chief Egyptian spymaster Omar Suleiman, widely seen and the CIA's man in Cairo, who attempted to take over from Mubarak when the longtime dictator finally stepped down because of the uprising in 2011 (Suleiman himself died in a Cleveland hospital in 2012). 

Al-Libi was eventually turned over to Muammar Gaddafi, at a time when he and the US government were rather cordial. He would apparently end up being "suicided" in 2009 in a great favor Gaddafi did for the US government before it would turn on him two years later.

Researchers for Human Rights Watch have done some good work in getting information on the al-Libi case, but Ken Roth, the now celebrated former head of the group, doesn't seem to take to heart the lessons of that case. He wrote that the CIA "forgot its own conclusions from 1989: inhumane interrogation was 'counterproductive,' yielded false answers” in reference to a New York Times piece: "Report Portrays a Broken C.I.A. Devoted to a Failed Approach." But it's not that the CIA "forgot"-- the torture regime is actually designed to produce false but useful information that can be used to justify hideous polices.

Some have made an issue of some video of torture being destroyed, particularly when Gina Haspel was nominated to be CIA head. But it's been widely assumed that they were destroyed simply because of the potentially graphic nature of the abuse. But there's another distinct possibility: They were destroyed because of the questions they document being asked. Do the torturers ask: "Is there another terrorist attack?" Or do they more compel: "Tell us that Iraq and al-Qaeda are working together."? The video evidence to answer that question has apparently been destroyed -- with barely anyone raising the possibility of that being the reason. 

An additional question: Is this related to why prisoners are still held in Guantanamo? That is, are some of the individuals still held there not simply because they were tortured, but because they were tortured into lying for strategic purposes?

This case shows:

• Rather than making things up out of whole cloth, the US government seems quite capable of creating elaborate, murderous scenarios for the purpose of creating false “evidence” to achieve policy goals.

• Torture, contrary to the liberal mantra, DOES work — to achieve diabolical purposes. In fact, the liberal “objections” to torture actually help obscure its actual utility.

• The system can get away with it. A few reputations are “tarnished” to be sure, but virtually all involved in the US establishment are either elevated or walk away and the system goes on to the next atrocity. Until there’s accountability for such murderous deceits, they will continue.