Torture in pursuit of a fantasy

As disturbing as the revelations of torture were, on at least some level if you stood back, squinted, ignored the consequences, ignored the law, ignored the damage to our country at home and abroad, and just didn't concentrate too much on the guilt or innocence or level of knowledge that the detainees you tortured had, you could at least say "Well, they at least were trying to protect the country after 9/11 from threats they saw as imminent." Yeah......not so much.

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.
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"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

Ahh, Ahmed Chalabi, how could you have steered us wrong? If you can't trust a man who made his living off of getting government money for telling the US what it wanted to hear about Iraq and funneling funds through his phony "Iraqi National Congress" after he made his living defrauding and failing a bank, who can you trust?

Kind of makes you all warm and fuzzy inside to learn that stress positions, bug caskets, extreme temperature variations, sleep deprivation, walling, and waterboarding were all done in our name on the premise that the Bush Administration really wanted someone, anyone, to tell them what they wished was true. What's it say that multiple rounds of torture on multiple detainees still couldn't get one of them to even make up a story? I guess this stuff is what Cheney is referring too when he says the Bush Administration doesn't "got much to apologize for."