Whether American officials violated the law to justify torture is a hugely important moral issue.
Whether American officials launched a war under false pretenses is a hugely important moral issue.
What if it turns out that the two are connected, that torture was used in order generate a false pretext for the war?
Here’s what’s at issue. Torture defenders have justified the practice as being about preventing imminent terrorist attacks. But read what Lawrence Wilkerson — Colin’s Powell’s chief of staff — writes today:

What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion — its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.
So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.
There in fact were no such contacts.

Now, there are two ways of looking at this: one scenario is horrible, the other is evil. Under the horrible scenario, Bush and Cheney genuinely believed that there was a strong Iraq-Al Queda link. They also believed that torture was a good way of getting accurate information out of bad guys. So when torture elicited information about a link, they felt that it validated both of their preconceived notions.
It’s appallingly derelict to not at least seriously assess whether torture-based information was accurate. Even torture advocates acknowledge that it sometimes produces false-positives, about which one must be attentive. To have launched a war that has killed almost 5,000 Americans based on such immature, wish-fulfillment-based decision making would be among the most negligent acts in U.S. history.
But what if it was something even worse? What if the administration suspected that the Iraq-Al Queda link was weak or non-existent and used the torture to manufacture evidence that made it seem stronger than it was?
I have to say, even with everything that’s happened, I’m more inclined to believe the former than the latter. Self-delusion is more often the explanation of events than rank, clear-headed evil.
But Wilkerson — possibly in a position to know — seems to think it’s the latter and there’s enough of a possibility that it needs to be investigated.
I’m still dazed by the possibility. If this proves true, wouldn’t that be the worst scandal in American history?