Two stories were told to justify US involvement in Iraq. The first was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which were never found. The second was an alleged link between al Qaeda and Iraq, which was also never found. The link story was dubious to begin with. Al Qaeda are Sunni fundamentalists, while Hussein’s government was secular, and the two despised each other. One story has been told to justify what its defenders call “harsh interrogation techniques,” and its critics call “torture”: that it led to high value intelligence that prevented loss of American lives. However, this report from contributor George Washington at Zero Hedge makes clear that whatever they are called, the tactics were also used to get detainees to tell their “interrogators” what they wanted to hear: that there was in fact an al Qaeda-Iraqi link. There were some coerced confessions to that effect, all subsequently disavowed or debunked. The Zero Hedge article examines a 2009 Senate Armed Services Committee report which details how tactics used by Communist China during the Korean War were used to elicit false confessions of an al Qaeda-Iraqi link.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-12/media-focusing-wrong-senate-torture-report
