Defecation Meets Ventilation
The BBC notes CIA torture report: US raises security ahead of release
Security has been stepped up at US facilities around the world ahead of the release of a report expected to reveal details of harsh CIA interrogations, the White House says.
…It is expected to detail the CIA’s campaign against al-Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11.
As well as detailing the controversial methods used by CIA operatives in an effort to extract information from high-value suspects, the report is expected to say harsh interrogations failed to deliver appropriate results.
In other words, the US violated its own laws and principles to torture people and it didn’t produce anything useful.
Torture doesn’t provide you with the truth, and never has. Torture produces whatever the victim believes the torturer wants to hear.
7 comments
I think they will let Darth Cheney and little Georgie die before they haul anyone away to jail for torture. Can’t put our heroic elected officials in prison just because they drove off the moral high ground.
(Nice post title, btw!)
Everyone involved in this decision should be shipped to Gitmo with an indefinite term of detention. I take this issue personally as it is sadistic and produces no useable information. That is a known fact. Also known are the techniques that have been used since World War II that are effective and are taught to military interrogators. None of those techniques even involve discomfort for those being interrogated, which is a prime reason they work.
Torture is a way to get “confessions” for Soviet-style show trials, not a way to get actionable intelligence.
I am amused by the notion that the shit is going to hit the fan when this report is released. To me this is like the report on Nixon’s “secret” bombing of Cambodia. The Cambodians damn well knew they were being bombed by American B-52’s, as did anybody who bothered actually going to Cambodia and talking to the Cambodians, it was only secret from Americans. Similarly, the people who were tortured damn well know they were tortured and what techniques were used to torture them, and they’re all over the Middle East because we had to release most of them when they proved to be common taxi drivers or sheep herders or whatever rather than terrorists, meaning that everybody in the Middle East already knows everything in this report. This report has secrets only from Americans.
In other words, there’s no terrorist recruitment info in this report — the terrorists already know everything in the report from debriefing the poor schmucks we tortured and have been using that info for recruitment for the past ten years — the only people it will embarrass are Darth “Traitor” Cheney (he who divulged the name of a CIA agent and ended up killing dozens of CIA assets and destroying an entire anti-proliferation network) and his ilk, who’ve been busy slithering out of Mordor touting how torture gave us all this actionable information yada yada (which of course it didn’t) every time anybody mentions “the US tortured people.” So now every time the Big Dick opens his mouth we can stuff this report in it and tell him to shut his evil gaping maw. That’s about all this report really means, because if you think any Busheviks are going to go to jail for torture, I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya…
– Badtux the Cynical Penguin
There is no great mystery about what Cheney really did or what the CIA really did: anyone who cared to know had only to read Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side about Cheney and Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars about both Cheney and the CIA.
Competent journalists are amazing, and Obama hasn’t managed to jail all of them yet; even if he were to jail these two, their books are available to me through the library a block and a half from home… and they haven’t quite managed to intimidate the librarians yet, not that Dubya didn’t try…
About the only reactions I noticed are other complicit nations having to admit they were part of the scheme, and some of them condemning US actions. The only people who didn’t know there was torture were Americans who refused to believe it, and the report isn’t going to change their minds.
We’ve discussed torture a few time over the years, especially when GW was Prez.
You know the USA & Europe used to use water-boarding to *cure* some mental conditions in some Sanitariums from the mid 19th Century? It was called the ‘water cure’, synonymous with hydropathy at the time. The USA does love to hold onto it’s traditions! 😀 Whether or not they have any real value.
Torture is only used by fascist & dictatorial States to terrify the population to keep them in line. It’s been used by all the dictators/fascists throughout human history. There was a Stasi report discovered after the fall of E. Germany that stated that torture was usually ineffective at getting information, but effective in controlling the population. I saw the same thing first hand in Cambodia, and in fact some of our intel gathering missions included such documents. Also, I was trained that no single source of intel is sufficient. It must always be verified and usually by several sources & methods. The USA seems to believe that a single source is actionable. They have been proven wrong many times. But again, old habits (traditions)… Stupid people do stupid things. *shrug* “Dammit! It will work! One day.”
Anything with less than three independent sources is rumor, not intel. It isn’t a fact unless you have at least five cites, none of which are derivative. “Curveball” was such an obviously bogus source, that I think the Germans passed the information along as a joke, not as a serious report. Cheney was demanding everything that could possibly support the delusions of the neocons, so the CIA finally caved and gave up what little credibility they had. Political promotions among the senior officers spelled the doom of the DoD intel effort.
We used to be pretty damned effective when we followed the rules, but that’s gone.