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In his disingenuous memoir , At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet sought to defend the CIA's acceptance of the original claims made by al-Libi in the run-up to the Iraq war. Tenet even suggested that al-Libi may have been right the first time—that it may have been his subsequent recantation that was not genuine.
"He clearly lied," Tenet wrote. "We just don't know when. Did he lie when he first said that Al Qaeda members received training in Iraq or did he lie when he said they did not? In my mind, either case might still be true."
I am not making this up. That incisive analysis appears on page 353 of Tenet’s book.
Tenet, of course, is hardly a disinterested observer. If there was a CIA plan to extract a false confession, it's likely he was a key participant. After all, he devoted 2002-03 to the mission of manufacturing a "slam-dunk" WMD-case for invading Iraq, in order to please his bosses. He had both the motive and the opportunity to commit this crime and, later, huge incentive to cover it up.
Al-Libi “Commits Suicide”
If al-Libi is now dead — strangely our embassy in Tripoli has been unable to find out for sure — this means the world will never hear his own account of the torture he experienced and the story he made up and then recanted. And we have already been asked to believe he “committed suicide” even though al-Libi apparently was a devout Muslim, and Islam prohibits suicide.
Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of the Gaddafi regime, explained to Newsweek, “This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya.” He added that, throughout Gaddafi’s 40-year rule, there have been several instances in which political prisoners were reported to have committed suicide, but that “then the families get the bodies back and discover the prisoners had been shot in the back or tortured to death.”
Am I suggesting…?
Anatomy of a Crime
Commenting on what he called the “Cheney interrogation techniques,” Col. Wilkerson, writing for The Washington Note on May 13, made the following points:
“…as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion — its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but on discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq to al-Qaeda.
“So furious was this effort on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee ‘was compliant’ (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet.
“As far as al-Libi is concerned, his harsh interrogation ceased after, under waterboarding in Egypt, he ‘revealed’ such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.”
Cheney Family Honor
Stung by Wilkerson’s criticism of her father, Liz Cheney, who worked in the State Department during the Bush/Cheney administration, lashed out publicly at Wilkerson on Sunday, charging he has made “a cottage industry out of fantasies” about the former Vice President. All that Ms. Cheney could manage in support of her contention was to point out that al-Libi was not among the three al-Qaeda detainees the CIA has said it waterboarded.
After his article in The Washington Note, I asked Col. Wilkerson for a retrospective look at how it could have been that the torture-derived information from al-Libi was not recognized for what it was and thus kept out of Secretary Powell’s speech at the UN.
