Apropos of this post about Lawrence Wilkerson‘s charge that the torture apparatus built by the Bush administration was concerned with manufacturing an al-Qaeda/Saddam Hussein link as a pretext for invading Iraq, look what HuffPost’s Sam Stein pulls out of the memory hole. This is an account of the interrogation of 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed:

[A] line buried on page 353 of the July 2004 Select Committee on Intelligence report on pre-Iraq war intelligence strongly suggests that the interrogation was just as centered on a possible Iraq-al-Qaeda link as terrorist activity.

"CTC [Counter Terrorist Center] noted that the questions regarding al-Qaida’s ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented to senior al-Qaida operational planner Khalid Shaikh Muhammad following his capture."

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003.

Crossposted to The Streak.