The argument that using torture produced anything like useful intelligence. It didn’t.
Marcy on last night’s 60 Minutes torture apologia:
Whether the timing–coming out just as Mitt Romney and his torturer-advisors face off against Obama in the General Election–was planned or not, the effect will be to turn torture into a campaign issue with two sides treated as legitimate by a spineless press, rather than one side with self-preservation in mind and the other with exhaustive study.
And sadly, that will probably mean the most interesting (and politically explosive) result of the investigation gets lost, relegated to paragraph 26 of 27.
Critics also say that still-classified records are likely to demonstrate that harsh interrogation techniques produced far more information that proved false than true.
Dana Priest reveals that, when Jose Rodriguez tried to persuade her not to publish news of the black sites in 2005, he tried to argue torture “was producing real results and helping to keep the country safe.” We’re about to get validation that the example of Ibn Sheikh al-Libi was not unique (though his treatment was included in the scope of the SSCI study). If torture “was producing real results” those results were false confessions, not real intelligence.
If we’re going to have a debate about torture, the fact that Cheney and his torturers used it to create false stories to–among other things–get us into the Iraq War should be at the center of that debate.
Is it more moral to capture a terrorist (whatever that is) and then torture the person? Or to blow a terrorist up with a missile fired from a drone? Generally the only person impacted in the first scenario is the terrorist. In the latter case lots of innocent women and children have been killed. The “War on Terrorists” is equally as ridiculous as is the “War on Drugs.” Both are political tools used by politicians to confound and confuse the 99%. As well as make the military industrial and prison industrial complex rich. During tomorrows OWS’ General Strike watch our militarized police force bust some “terrorist” heads. Training these ex-military types to kill in Iraq and Afghanistan has really paid off for all of us. Hasn’t it?