Cheney's Request

The Telegraph has a story about another prisoner Dick Cheney's office apparently wanted to waterboard, or maybe place in a cell with a caterpillar:

Dick Cheney, the former US vice-president, suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner whom White House officials suspected might possess knowledge of a potential connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, it has emerged

The guy, Muhammed Khudair al-Dulaimi, is virtually unknown to Google. The only first page hit of significance linked to Yossef Bodansky's book 'The Secret History of the Iraq War', which describes him thusly:

An expert in bomb-making techniques, remote-control fuses, special operations, sabotage and assassination, Khudair established a network of former Mukhabarat operatives to train and supply the growing Islamist networks in the Sunni heartland.

This is backed up by other reporting that claims the Baathists were funding and equipping Islamist cells for the insurgency. Here's the way the Telegraph described Dulaimi:

head of the M-14 section of the Mukhabarat secret police, whose responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.

Wonder where they got the M14 job description, and wonder if "contacts with terrorist groups" was there before 9/11? They talked of bomb-making, which brings this guy back to mind. Anyway, it appears Dulaimi was an early capture since he wasn't on the original deck of cards but a lot of his tribal kin are still on the current Iraqi 41 most wanted list. Saddam's lawyer was also from the Dulaimi tribe. Sounds like a crime family.

The reality-based community might try to make a deal out of this to deflect Pelosi-gate, since the queen herself referred to Bush lying about Iraq in her shaky defense presser thing yesterday. We know the only bigger strawmonster than Cheney is the idea that al Qaeda and Saddam could never have worked together because they hated each other so frickin bad, even though they both hated the very same enemies.

But it's also possible Cheney was living up to his paranoid reputation, chasing around ghosts trying to use any means to prove Feith and the others at OSP were correct. Otherwise it seems reasonable to assume we would have heard more about Mr. Dulaimi somewhere along the way. That is, unless he never cracked. Wonder where he is now?