Control of the lie: Cheney, Torture, and the Iraq War

This is no surprise. Cheney apparently led the Congressional briefings on torture and also apparently threatened members of Congress should they reveal the information:

"Throughout this period, Cheney also repeatedly threatened members of Congress about the personal consequences to them of disclosure of classified information provided in briefings. In retrospect the subtext of those threats is now clear: Cheney was insisting that they not breathe a word about the Bush torture program. The CIA’s decision to suppress these facts in the account they provided the intelligence committee is further evidence of dissembling on a highly material point. But all of this highlights the need for an outside investigation that will probe how Cheney gamed the system with support from the CIA, and how Congressional leaders failed to protect their turf and discharge their constitutional function of oversight."

You might also recall that it was the OVP who organized the briefings on Iraq war intelligence through through their own channels - the Office of Special Plans in the Department of Defense and through Stephen Hadley, the then-National Security Adviser. Congress was provided with the false narrative of the Niger uranium through these channels. In other words, Cheney closely controlled what Congress saw not only relating to torture, but also relating to the false intelligence on Iraq. 

And if you recall, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration restricted classified information to only 8 members of Congress:

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush issued an order to the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, and his cabinet members that severely curtailed intelligence oversight by restricting classified information to just eight members of Congress.

"The only Members of Congress whom you or your expressly designated officers may brief regarding classified or sensitive law enforcement information," he writes, "are the Speaker of the House, the House Minority Leader, the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders, and the Chairs and Ranking Members of the Intelligence Committees in the House and Senate."

The order is aimed at protecting "military security" and "sensitive law enforcement."

(more after the fold)

So 8 people out of the entire Congress are informed of classified information, which we now know was cooked intelligence on Iraq and a cover-up of the torture program. All of this points to one inescapable conclusion: the lies were premeditated as were the crimes. 

Moreover, the CIA's account of the torture briefings appears to be yet another cover-up. From the above Harper's link:

"We’re now a month past the CIA’s release of a summary to the Senate Intelligence Committee concerning its briefings of Congressional leaders about the introduction of the Bush program of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding. Two things emerge at this point. One is that the CIA’s summary is riddled with errors and grossly unreliable. It missed facts as obvious as that Porter Goss had left Congress and was running the CIA, and it lists a substantial number of briefings which never took place."

I think we can no longer escape that a conspiracy to mislead Congress into authorizing war with Iraq involved the highest ranking officials of the Bush administration who seemed to have planned the fraud well in advance and narrowed the number of Congressional members they would allow to have access to the information in order to control the lies and their delivery. A small group of people in the DOD, in the White House, in DOJ, and CIA collectively lied and plotted this nation into an illegal war using torture, forgeries, and domestic propaganda. That is the picture now coming into view.

In summary, the Bush administration knew they could not lie to the entire Congress and about something as serious as war. So they took the following measures:

-they first limited who would see intelligence to 8 people.

-they made sure that Bush loyalists were counted among those 8 (Sen. Roberts - see here).

-a special group in the DOD called the Office of Special Plans was created to "find" evidence on Iraq and these very same people also briefed members of Congress (the 8 members of Congress)

-a special group was created in the White House to lie to the American people called the White House Iraq Group.

-the torture program was created to "fix the facts" around the "policy" to go to war with Iraq (see Downing Street Memos) and those false confessions were used to brief the gang of 8 members of Congress. (and I wager for phase II, war with Iran.)

-and they lied to the same 8 people about what the torture program was and its purpose. So worried was Cheney about controlling this flow of information that he personally stepped in to brief the gang of 8, as we now know. 

As you can see, this is premeditated and a conspiracy to lie the nation into war. Torture was merely one of the mechanisms through which this was accomplished. This is the very definition of high crimes.