A war based on a lie based on torture

One of the key lies used by Bush to sell his immoral war in Iraq was the claim of links between Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath regime and Al Qaeda. For example, in February 2003, Bush claimed that

Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks. Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.

And that

We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad.

The primary source for these claims was a high-level Al Qaeda captive named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Last month, we learned that American intelligence officials believed as early as February 2002 that al-Libi was "intentionally misleading [his] debriefers", and that his information was unreliable. A story from today's New York Times reveals why: because al-Libi's statements were extracted under torture:

The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and al-Qaida on detailed statements made by a prisoner in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and al-Qaida only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of al-Qaida members and others detained as part of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and al-Qaida included training in explosives and chemical weapons.

The evil compounds. Iraq wasn't just a war based on a lie; it was a war based on a lie based on torture.