And so Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi was first captured by the US and tortured by CIA surrogates in an Egyptian cell. Apparently, they beat him and put him in a coffin for 17 hours as a mock-burial. To end the severe mental and physical suffering, he confessed that Saddam had trained al Qaeda terrorists in deploying WMDs. This evidence was then cited by Colin Powell as part of the rationale for going to war in Iraq. Bingo! And we wonder why torture is such a temptation.
Al-Libi was found dead in his Libyan cell yesterday. Apparent suicide. What they did to this man went far beyond any bullshit debate about "caterpillars" and "frat hazing." I want to hear from Scarborough and others about how this wasn't torture.
And whether or not his death was part of a conspiracy to silence him, I have no idea. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that the real conspiracy surrounding al-Libi is how the Bush administration used torture as means to justify invading Iraq.
As more information pours out, I grow more and more certain (as Sullivan does, too) that torture was absolutely authorized as an integral tool in building the case for war.
It might also explain why Cheney and other like-minded officials are so desperate to obfuscate and skew the issue into this Möbius loop about "keeping us safe" and "waterboarding is/isn't torture." It's all beginning to sound like a desperate attempt to keep our attention diverted away from talking about the Why? I mean, he's enlisted his daughter in this bastardization of the law!
Put another way, this is looking more and more like an effort by Cheney to cover his ass, knowing that torture was almost entirely about fabricating a pretext for war. Torture, after all, is one thing, but proving that Cheney et al authorized torture as a means to falsify a justification for war would make this one of the biggest criminal conspiracies in American history.