According to former intelligence and military officials, former Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushed interrogators to use torture to prove once and for all that a link did exist between al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, prior to the US invasion in 2003. Cheney and Rumsfeld advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation and stress positions and waterboarding on suspected terrorists for most of 2002 and into 2003 in order to corroborate the claims of former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and others that Saddam was working with Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaeda detainees repeatedly—Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003.
“When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the interrogation program. A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Major Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at Guantánamo Bay were under pressure to produce evidence of ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. None was ever found—with or without the use of torture.
In fact, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were more rivals than allies. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 and it looked like he might continue into Saudi Arabia, bin Laden appealed to the Saudi royal family to allow him and his followers, battle-hardened from fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, to defend the kingdom against Saddam’s troops. Instead, King Fahd chose to turn over the defense of Saudi Arabia to the U.S. military.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
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