Policy-Driven Madness-The Downing Street & Torture Memos-"Linked In Time"

[kpete]

Policy-Driven Madness , July 23-25, 2002: Fixing the Facts and the Law to an Iraq Invasion Policy
By: JimWhite Tuesday April 28, 2009 6:09 am

.................

............. on July 25, 2002, Jim Haynes approached JPRA for SERE training information on waterboarding because Jay Bybee ruled on July 24, 2002 that waterboarding would be illegal. She includes this passage from a Charlie Savage article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/us/politics/23legal.html?_r=4

If it turned out that the lawyers initially concluded that aspects of the proposed program would be illegal, then reversed that conclusion at the request of policy makers, then prosecutors could make a case that the officials knowingly broke the law.

I was struck by Savage's choice of words here. In referring to "policy makers" soliciting legal advice to fit the desired outcome (waterboarding is legal) I was reminded of the famous passage in the Downing Street Memo. When I went to review the wording, I was struck further by the timing of the memo. It was issued on July 23, 2002.

.............................

Here is the famous line from the Downing Street Memo, issued July 23, 2002:

But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

As you will recall, this memo, prepared by British intelligence, contained a report from a visit to Washington. Immediately preceding the sentence above, we have these two sentences:

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.

The "policy", then, around which the facts and intelligence were being fixed, was to invade Iraq.

.....................

Besides being linked in time, these two acts of fixing intelligence and the law to policy have another unifying theme, and that is the Iraq invasion. I described above the invasion context of the Downing Street Memo. Waterboarding also is linked to the invasion, as McClatchy reported that a driving force for torture in general, and waterboarding specifically, was to extract a link between Saddam and 9/11.

much more (plus great links) at:
http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/5008