Back when George W. Bush told the American people that “We do not torture!”. I had to wonder if he wasn’t lying over a technicality. In retrospect, we it’s already common knowledge that we routinely “outsourced” the dirty business of torture to other countries with far less concern for human rights. They called this sordid business “rendition” to make it sound less evil.

But given the conservative preoccupation towards the outsourcing of all aspects of government, whether it be mercenaries for an illegal war, incompetent private for profit hospitals for wounded vets, “vouchers” for private schools (to indoctrinate the next generation with conservative propoganda with impunity at taxpayer expense), or toll roads, it all looked like a roundabout way for conservatives to finally succeed in shrinking our government until it was small enough to drown in their bathtub.

Wouldn’t it only make sense for the Cheney selected operatives working at the CIA and other spook organizations to start outsourcing their dirty work to corporate insiders that shared their Neo-con philosophies? They could accomplish their hidden agendas without fear of internal whistleblowers. The employees would have no civil servant protections preventing the politicization of the corporate provider. Within the associated anarchy and lack of accountability, they could even turn their corporate intelligence apparatus towards manipulating the democratic process, or even elections, all funded by U.S. taxpayers.

In the last few days we finally learned that the CIA had employed the overtly “Christian” Blackwater to spy on and possibly assasinate Al Qaeda leaders, all so they could “distance” themselves from these black-ops, and all with Cheney’s mandate that Congress not be informed, usurping their unique responsibility for oversight.

Here’s is my theory: What’s the possibility that any day it might be revealed that Blackwater, or some similar corporate crony of the Neo-cons, was secretly outsourced to perform interrogations for the CIA? The very nature of a corporate contract involves stating the service to be provided, in this case interrogation to be performed by a bunch of amateurs. How the contractor accomplishes this is usually beyond the scope of the contract. In other words, “We don’t care how you do it, just get information from these prisoners!”.

If true, then what Bush was really saying was a lie by technical omission. “We don’t torture!”, (“That’s the contractor’s job!”).

Another concern came from my amazement that any competent interrogator is well aware that torture only gets you what you want to hear. Why would any reasonably educated government power employ such a clearly useless and crude method, unless they were truly ignorant of it’s consequences, including the fact that such techniques become a great recruiting tool for the terrorist. At first I simply concluded that Bush, Cheney and the Neo-cons really were that ignorant (since they’re clearly living on a different planet). But then a far more sinister motive came into suspicion. Their agenda, alone with the AEI, since before 911 was the invasion of Iraq. What if they never really cared about accurate intelligence? What if all they really wanted all along was a justification for invading Iraq based on 911? If so, torture would be the perfect tool for justifying a policy decision that was already made. People will say anything under torture.

Maybe the Neo-cons weren’t as dumb as I thought….