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Information Secured Through Torture Proved Unreliable, CIA Concluded
Peter Finn and Joby Warrick at the Washington Post:
When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him. The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.
In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida - chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates - was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
Lie No. 1: We do not torture. Since that doesn't work any more, it's time for the fallback.
Lie No. 2: We saved thousands of American lives by torture.
Note that Dick Cheney makes bald claims to the effect that the security and safety of the nation rests on the use of torture techniques that he introduced and hammered down on intelligence agents who didn't want to use them. He doesn't ever cite a for-instance. When pressed, he insists that this is all "top secret." This is another instance of the use of security classifications to cover lies-in this case, lies on top of other lies.
The truth is very clear. President Bush's torture techniques provided our terrorist adversaries with their most compelling recruitment theme ever. Thousands were mustered to their side as a result. Four thousand Americans died in Iraq as a consequence, and thousands of other Americans suffered severe injuries from IEDs and other attacks. And the balance? Did America secure any meaningful, actionable intelligence through the use of torture? Let's turn to Bush's FBI Director for the answer. Here's the close of David Rose's memorable recent article in Vanity Fair:
I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls "enhanced techniques"? "I'm really reluctant to answer that," Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: "I don't believe that has been the case."
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20 Comments so far
Show AllThe bush White House is a permanent disgrace to God and country. Every member of the Bush administration belongs behind bars. From what they have done to Iraq, to what they have done to their own county-throw the bastards in prison. It is the only place for people like this. And the world will truly be a better place for having done that.
Every member of the US Congress and Senate belongs in jail.
Ridiculous. No wonder the 'left' is in such disarray.
I am not "of" the left. I am not in disarray.
Your statement is that of a naive teenager. You sure like to think of yourself as a 'radical', someone who gets it. You don't even know what 'left' means. The left is in a depressing state of disarray when people who criticize the administration from the left (look it up!) are so silly, juvenile, and confused. Just be quiet.
If you chose to wear the straightjacket of lables and anothers definition then that your problem, not my own. That you so eager and willing to crawl into that straightjacket is rather telling.
Do you have opinions of your own or do you let the label of "left" and "right" dictate them to you?
Is there some Committee out there that decides what "thoughts" are from the left and what ones from the right?
I would rather use my whole brain then be a half wit. Only a simpleton would have to check whether a given "Value" or "policy" from the left or the right before they see fit to embrace or reject it.
Sioux Rose
GET REAL: I for one would appreciate your showing a little more civility towards those you disagree with. It's like you go through these threads using your pen/keyboard as a weapon to SLASH into others. There's a lot of pain in this world today, and we are not meant to all see through the same prism. Even absolute truth can be taken from a variety of contexts. A little kindness, friend, would be helpful here; and you can of course still hone your intellect in whatever debates draw your interest. Ultimately your anger is justified (given where the US is today), but colleagues in the forum are not the true or intended targets, are they?
Jeevee
Hey! Please don't forget the honesty and courage of Dennis Kucinich!
So, the CIA got nothing, then why did they destroy over 200 hours of torture videos?
The answer is they were trying to get confessions by "brainwashing" their captives.....These were a continuation of the studies done in the 50's and 60's to destroy the old person and create a new one....The reality is those experiments created scizophrenics.....
Now, the CIA had a chance for long term brainwashing and they did have some success in extracting confessions.....except, those confessions should be rendered worthless by any judge including the ones dealing with 9/11...How in the world did Khalid Sheik Mohammed plant those explosives in World Trade Center #7?
Perhaps the C.I.A. destroyed as much of their "video library" on "enhanced interrogation" because even they, at long last, realized that they truly had committed crimes defined in the Geneva Conventions and they at least didn't want to be in the position in which Richard Nixon found himself: convicted by his own material.
With this story, and all of history, as background, let's keep in mind that in the system created by the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act "evidence" gained by "enhanced interrogation techniques" can be used to convict YOU and you don't get to 1) KNOW it was obtained that way or 2) challenge it based on the historic uselessness of such "information." That’s still in place.
The Bushies f-ed up badly. They had the notion that torture worked despite evidence to the contrary. Start torturing me and I'll tell you everything I think you want to know, true or not. Even if I knew something, all the lies told to stop the torture would bury it. Hopefully Obama will get something right and imprison these evil fools.
Duh. For this we need the CIA?
Joe
Once the breath and scope of the incompetent chicken-hawk fascism of Dubya, Cheney, & Co., embodied in this shameful episode straight out of the banana republic playbook, is fully realized, future generations will be gobsmacked.
Can anyone comment or submit an article on the assertion that the purpose of torture is not information??!!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/dec/10/usa.comment
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0512-23.htm
I think you might be a wee bit categorical. Klein does claim that it's main purpose is terror--to control adversaries of whatever regime. (Imagine being part of a group that works clandestinely against a repressive gov't. One of your members is found dead and had been horrifically tortured. Scares the crap out of you and makes you think twice.)
But torture has also been used since forever to elicit info. While real pros all seem to claim that there are better ways--especially with people who definitely have valuable info and when interrogation specialists have the time required to work with them using proven, sophisticated interrogation techniques--torture does make people talk, and it can obviously work in some cases to get accurate info. (Please understand that I'm not justifying it in any way...and I agree completely with Klein's articles on the subject.)
In Iraq, the military was caught by surprise by the resistance and didn't even have interpreters to talk to people, and were otherwise totally incompetent. And...Dumsfeld was yelling louder and louder every day on video conference calls to find out who were these insurgents, as the panic was growing in Washington that the election year 2004 (this is 2003, remember) would arrive with Iraq in turmoil from a nasty insurgency.
So soldiers were ordered to grab people who seemed like they might be 'bad guys' and they were tortured! Any wonder this was less than successful? Also, these morally-challenged simpletons handed out wads of loot to people for info. Of course the worst elements in the society came forward to grab some of that loot by giving whatever names: enemies, competitors for whatever scam they had going, etc.
Now, more 'innocent' people were rounded up and tortured to the point that they in turn did some 'singing' and likely more innocent people got picked up. And so went the merrygoround of total incompetence. A horror of horrors, that would be a farce if it wasn't so horrific.
So the reality that torture led to very little useful info is not solely because of the limitations of that method. It's also because it was carried out by incompetent idiots.
This would be interesting as a possiblity if it were not for the fact that we already know that the impetus for the torture came right out of the administration. This wasn't some soldiers caught by surprise, hurting captives to find out who was in the next tree line. This was the highest officials in the nation discussing and selecting and authorizing specific illegal acts to be carried out against people we had detained.
I made it perfectly clear that the orders came from Dumsfeld who was obviously in contact with his bum-boy Cheney... It's not a possibility, it's the way things happened. They (Bushie-boy, the Dick Cheney, Dumsfeld, idiot Mushroom-Cloud Condie, etc.) were caught by surprise by an insurgency they had been way to stupid to anticipate. And then they improvised...including torturing whoever they got their hands on to try and get the people responsible and obviously to end the insurgency.
Why don't you read? No wonder the left is such a depressingly inept sack of shit.
I guess I just don't see calm, extended deliberations among officials eight thousand miles away and the selection and application of specific methods to specific captives as "improvisation."
The CIA has been nothing but a useless agency other than enabling terrorist organizations. Demolish that agency already and save us taxpayers the expense !
We've known these truths for years.
If any plot had been averted do you think that Cheney would have been unable to resist gloating while dropping some kind of hint about the plot?