Tuesday, November 6, 2007

We tortured a guy to get Colin Powell's false "evidence" used at UN

To get Colin Powell's since refuted "evidence" in his speech to the U.N. before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Egypt tortured the guy after we "rendered" him to the country:
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.")
Note to Katherine Kersten: Using torture can sometimes really set you back and deceive you. And as Atrios notes, false confessions are a feature, not a bug, of torture, i.e. the Bushies actually got what they wanted from al Libi, regardless of whether it was true or not.

No comments: