Secondly, Robert Windrem, who covered terrorism for NBC, reports:
*Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.Two very important items. The first suggests torture didn't work. The second suggests we used torture to get people to confess to false accusations. In this case it was to confess to fake ties of Iraq and al Qaeda, items the government knew weren't true but wanted a confession to anyway. The reason for a fake confession was to gain a justification to invade Iraq. Lies piled on top of lies. I think we all should let it sink in for the full effect: We, the United States of America, tortured people to get them to confess to false accusations so we could invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.
*Update:
Jesse Ventura, someone who has been waterboarded, says give him a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour and he would have him confessing to the Sharon Tate murders.
KING: You were a Navy SEAL.
VENTURA: That’s right. I was water boarded, so I know — at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence — every one of us was water boarded. It is torture.
KING: What was it like?
VENTURA: It’s drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you — I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.
