Over six and a half years have elapsed since March, 2003, but much information has become available in the past year to help us reconstruct a number of important events that month. The evidence points convincingly to a conscious decision by the Bush administration to engage in overwhelming use of torture in a last-ditch attempt to provide another false justification for a war which was still launched, even as the justification then in use also was being shown to be false.

When the OLC memos authorizing torture were released last April, one of the biggest stories to emerge was that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March, 2003, as discovered originally by Marcy Wheeler. Noting that March, 2003 also was the month of the US invasion of Iraq, the question then arose whether KSM was waterboarded in an attempt to extract a confessed link between 9/11 and Saddam. There now is significant information to allow a "yes" answer to that question.

As McClatchy discovered in the Senate Armed Services Committee report, Major Charles Burney confirmed to investigators that interrogators at Guanatanamo were under pressure to produce a link between al Qaeda and Iraq:

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

It is not too big a stretch to suggest that if the Guantanamo interrogators were under such pressure, then KSM’s interrogators at the black site where he was waterboarded were under similar pressure. In fact, further support for this idea is found in the CIA OIG Report released in August. On pages 112 to 113 in that large pdf file, we learn of instructions to interrogators at black sites:

Agency officers report that reliance on analytical assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence may have resulted in the application of EITs without justification. Some participants in the Program, particularly field interrogators, judge that CTC assessments to the effect that detainees are withholding information are not always supported by an objective evaluation of available information and the evaluation of the interrogators but are too heavily based, instead, on presumptions of what the individual might or should know.

Today, we have a piece of information that fits into the passage above in a very interesting way. Note again that KSM was captured on March 1, 2003 and the invasion of Iraq was on March 20 (Iraq time). In today’s Telegraph, we have this very important revelation from the ongoing UK investigation into the Iraq war build-up:

However, Sir William Ehrman, director of international security at the Foreign Office from 2000 to 2002, told the inquiry: “We were getting in the very final days before military action some (intelligence) on chemical and biological weapons that they were dismantled and (Saddam) might not have the munitions to deliver it.

“On March 10 we got a report saying that the chemical weapons might have remained disassembled and that Saddam hadn’t yet ordered their re-assembly and he might lack warheads capable of effective dispersal of agents.”

Keep in mind that the Bush administration was pushing two lies about Iraq and al Qaeda at that time. First, they tried to establish a direct link between Saddam and the 9/11 attack. In addition, though, another lie repeated incessantly was that it was necessary to remove Saddam from power because he posed a risk of giving his weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda.

Now we know that on March 10, more evidence became available that Saddam’s WMD’s were likely still dismantled and therefore not readily available to anyone. That makes the Bush administration claim of a danger of transfer of WMD’s from Saddam to al Qaeda "unsupported by credible intelligence" and makes the decision to proceed all the way to 183 applications of the waterboard even more despicable if the intent was to elicit a link known by other means to be false.

On March 20, the invasion of Iraq proceeded. No WMD’s were found. Hundreds of thousands died and millions were displaced from their homes. The Obama administration still refuses to press charges for torture or for waging war under false pretenses. Yes, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August, 2002, but March, 2003 stands out as the month when the US lost its soul by relying on torture in an attempt to produce further false pretenses for waging aggressive war.