Ticking Bombs… Thinking Through the Implications
In his book, officially cleared for publication, Tenet confirms how the CIA outsourced al Libi’s interrogation. He said he was sent to a third country (inadvertently named in another part of the book as Egypt) for “further debriefing.”
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Yet, on this occasion, the CIA believed al Libi’s tales of torture — an account that has proved to be one of the most serious indictments of the agency’s practice of extraordinary rendition: sending suspected Islamic terrorists into the hands of foreign jailers without legal process.
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Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons. This evidence was used by Colin Powell at the United Nations a year earlier (February 2003) to justify the war in Iraq. (“I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al Qaeda,” Powell said. “Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.”)
Put another way… under torture, the guy provided information that helped sell the Iraq war, and which was false. For those who like the Ticking Bomb scenario… what happens if the next guy we torture, or rather, whose torture we have outsourced, tells us that Russia and China are going to launch a sneak attack on US soil within the next month?