[..] you have a flurry of claims that a key motive behind the push to torture was to elicit 'confessions' about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, which was of course the key predicate for the invasion of Iraq. That again has to create much more pressure to clarify what happened. The basis of most of the anti-torture push has been the assumption that torture was used for the purpose of eliciting information about future terrorist attacks. Whether it was illegal, wrong-headed, misguided, immoral -- whatever -- most have been willing to at least give the benefit of the doubt that that was the goal. If the driving force was to gin up new bogus intel about the fabled Iraq-al Qaida link, politically it will put the whole story in a very different light. And rightly so.It's a serious charge, and the publicly available evidence is far from conclusive. But that's exactly why there should be an investigation or truth commission. We need facts, not partisan posturing over scraps of information that may or may not have been released.
Happily, Ambers lists ten reasons why a torture probe is more likely.
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