I've just sat through a half hour of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," as Scarborough, Mika and their guests, including Chuck Todd, pretend that yesterday never happened.
To review, yesterday, the Levin report revealed some startling things, none more startling than this:
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.
In other words, the push from Cheney, Rumsfeld, and even Condi Rice, was not about preventing an imminent attack, or, as Joe Scarborough keeps insisting, a matter of political differences between the old and new administrations.
The torture programs devised by Rumsfeld, largely, via reverse-engineering the SERE program was being used in much the same way the Maoist Chinese used it against our soldiers during the Korean War: to produce false confessions that would justify an invasion of Iraq that President Bush was at the time claiming he wasn't even considering.
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