Just five days after 9/11, Dick Cheney announced his plan to work "the dark side" on Meet the Press. For the next seven years, he fulfilled his promise through torture and other war crimes.
Cheney's torture began early in 2002, a full year before the invasion of Iraq. On Cheney's instructions, the CIA took Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi away from the FBI, with whom he was cooperating, and sent him to Egypt to be tortured into "confessing" Iraq trained Al Qaeda in use of chemical and biological weapons.
That false "confession" was immediately discredited by the DIA (and later by the CIA), but still featured in the most important pre-war speeches by Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Colin Powell. (In April, as U.S. interest in al-Libi's story grew, he was found dead in a Libyan prison and declared a "suicide.")
Next, the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times in August 2002. That came just before the "September rollout" of the Iraq propaganda campaign by Andy Card, Karl Rove, and the "White House Iraq Group." (The CIA broke the law in September 2002 by failing to disclose this torture to Congress - especially Intelligence Committee Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Bob Graham.)
Next, the CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003, the month Bush invaded Iraq without U.N. approval. (U.N. inspectors proved Saddam Hussein destroyed all his chemical weapons after the Gulf War of 1991.)
Cheney's torture continued through 2003 at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib - after U.S. troops found no WMD's and Ambassador Joe Wilson revealed Bush's pre-war nuclear lies.
As with Watergate, a handful of gutsy journalists have assembled the hidden pieces of this scandal: Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, Jonathan Landay of McClatchy, Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) of FireDogLake, Greg Sargent and Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post, and Paul Krugman and Frank Rich of the NY Times.
But most of the Corporate Media refuses to cover the biggest scandal in American history. Some are even manufacturing new Big Lies to cover up the old ones - including the Big Lie that Nancy Pelosi approved waterboarding in September 2002.
It's time for Congress to investigate the massive Iraq-Torture Scandal - and for the Department of Justice to prosecute Dick Cheney for creating it.
In 2002 and 2003, Dick Cheney ordered the torture of key prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially al-Libi, Abu Zubaydah, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Cheney says he ordered torture to stop another terrorist attack, but the evidence is now clear: Cheney wanted false "confessions" to justify the unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Those "confessions" were featured in key pre-war speeches by Cheney, George Bush, and Colin Powell that betrayed Congress, the American people, and the world.
Thus the "Torture" scandal and the "Iraq" scandal are not two separate scandals, but one massive and historically disastrous scandal: the Iraq-Torture Scandal.
Cheney claims his torture "saved hundreds of thousands of lives." In reality, it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - innocent Iraqi lives. It also killed over 4,300 U.S. soldiers, maimed hundreds of thousands more, cost U.S. taxpayers $3 trillion dollars, and profoundly damaged U.S. credibility and security.
Dick Cheney understands the enormity of his crimes and launched a public relations war to protect himself, including carefully-chosen TV interviews and speeches. His daughter (and chief defender) Liz Cheney admitted her father's greatest fear is prosecution.
