Worse than You Know

The Operative: It's worse than you know.
Mal: It usually is.

This last week should be declared Worse than You Know Week. Yes, it usually is...but this week in particular stands out for the number and severity of its Worse than You Know moments.

First we learn about our mini-gulag archipelago, the network of secret detention facilities where the CIA practices interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions on prisoners who officially don't exist.

Then Colin Powell's aide, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, tells NPR that he found an audit trail establishing that Cheney himself authorized the relaxed policies on torture.

Now, via Kevin Drum, not only is it worse than we know but the ways in which it's worse than we know have begun to converge.

Today's New York Times reports that 'intelligence' the administration peddled as showing a link between Iraq and al Qaeda was known to be dubious well before they started peddling it:

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons.

Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Kevin Drum points out that there was good reason for considering al-Libi's story dubious: al-Libi was a test case for Cheney's new torture policy. Initially cooperative when interrogated by the FBI, al-Libi was taken from them by the CIA for harsher treatment:

Al-Libi was handed over to the CIA. "They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo" for more-fearsome Egyptian interrogations, says the ex-FBI official. "At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, 'You're going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I'm going to find your mother and I'm going to f--- her.' So we lost that fight."

In other words, the administration's monstrous policy on torture fed the fraudulent intelligence they used in their monstrous effort to drag us into a war of (their) choice.

When I read my friend Deborah's reaction to the budget bill, I felt a little bad that I wasn't angrier about it myself. Drastically cutting aid to poor people while matching every dollar cut with two in tax cuts for rich people: totally outrageous. And yet I can't summon any outrage about it, because as wrong as it is, that's at least within the realm of politics. I'm still stuck on the criminal, on the potentially impeachable, on the completely monstrous things these people do. Of which there appears to be an inexhaustible supply.

Worse than you know, indeed.