Mary,
Yet, after coming up with the story that the Bushies want to hear, he was now deemed uncooperative because he couldn't provide them the "detail" they needed.
Did you mean....Bushies didn't want to hear?
Anyway that was the most striking element here to me too was the part where they determined he wasn't telling the truth until after he changed his story while he was being tortured. Yet they needed that "tortured admission" in order to make their case for war. If they were so certain he was lying, they must have determined that beforehand using other evidence and facts. So why did they even need his admission as the basis for this claim to go to war and why didn't they instead use the other evidence they must have had/used to determine al-Libi was lying in the first place?....(I know the answer to this but Gawd are these people are just plain evil).
Another case where the WHIP suppressed the whole story with dissenting caveats about al-Libi's testimony I see.
Posted by emal at December 9, 2005 06:48 AMemal, actually he gave them the thread that Iraq was conspiring with al Qaeada, but it wasn't enough - then they wanted the details. Who actually trained, when did it happen, where exactly in Iraq. And he didn't have any good answers to those questions - so they packaged him up in a box and sent him to our friends in Egypt to use other methods to extract more details. That's what this is all about. I wonder if Cheney was the one who told the US interrogators that al-Libi was obviously a liar and pushed for rendition.
And yes, I was thinking that this is a great example of WHIP in action when I read the new article last night.
Posted by Mary at December 9, 2005 07:33 AMAhhh gotcha now. Thanks for the clarification...I was assuming (wrongly) that he hadn't told them everything so they determined he was fabricating the whole thing and that it was only after he was tortured the "truth" came out and they felt he was no longer lying.
Now I see they felt he wasn't telling the WHOLE story (aka complete set of lies) that Bush wanted to hear. Sorry!
Posted by emal at December 9, 2005 07:59 AMSenator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, made public last month unclassified passages from the February 2002 document, which said it was probable that Mr. Libi "was intentionally misleading the debriefers."
The document showed that the Defense Intelligence Agency had identified Mr. Libi as a probable fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons.
If this was unclassified and senators saw it, why didn't they come out and say the president was using bad info?
Posted by CG at December 9, 2005 10:45 AMBut do you think anyone is buying the change in the narrative? It seems to me the Administration is finally being cornered on this issue. Finally.
I hope you don't mind me self-advertising, but I have an entry on my blog covering the history of articles relating to the al-Libi case. There is also another case where the threat of torture was enough for a detainee to fabricate parts of their statement.
Posted by elendil at December 9, 2005 06:50 PMCG, elendil has the NY Times article that talks about the declassified paper dated Nov 5, 2005.
The newly declassified portions of the document were made available by Senator Carl M. Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
That's why they couldn't talk about it before the war - and our elected representatives probably didn't even see it until now. However, the CIA was certainly keeping the White House in the loop.
Nice blog post, elendil. Thanks for sharing it.
Posted by Mary at December 10, 2005 09:45 AMWhat bothers me about this NYT story (it was also prominently featured on pg. one of the Mercury News Friday, 12/9/05) is that it tends to imply again that Bush may have made an "honest" mistake by giving this information obtained through rendition too much weight.
The focus of the story and blogger's follow up seems to be on the rendition aspect, probable torture, Egypt's role, etc.
But the average reader may just gather poor George was himself misled and did not really MEAN to mislead us when telling the nation about the Al-Qaida connection.
I would not put it past mainstream press to intend just such a bottom line impact for this story.
Sons
Posted by Sons at December 12, 2005 01:26 AM