At this point the only thin shred of an argument to which torture apologists have been clinging is its reputed effectiveness in saving us (i.e., the US of A) from deadly terrorist attacks that no other method of interrogation could or would. Indeed, most people who support torture could (to use a phrase popularized by Shepard Smith recently) “give a rat’s ass” about whether torture is illegal, immoral or both. Their calculus includes only one metric to determine whether torture techniques developed by tyrants and dictators over the centuries to elicit false confessions (or simply to please their inner sadist) should be used by the government of the United States: Does it work? To be more specific, does it provide valuable and reliable information that no other interrogation techniques short of torture could provide.
Despite the testimony of interrogators the world over that torture is a highly unreliable means of eliciting information from criminals, terrorists and anyone else unlucky enough to be swept up in a “dragnet” by the forces of government (military, intelligence or law enforcement, it makes little difference) as a possible suspect of something or other said government officials have been authorized to deal with, torture defenders like to point to statements made by a few individuals associated with the former Bush administration (Dick “I cannot shoot or get my story straight” Cheney, for example) as proof positive that Americans lives were saved only because a few brave men were willing to cross that dirty little line between humanity and inhumanity to do what had to be done. You know, like Jack Bauer in “24” or Jack Nicholson as Colonel Nathan R. Jessep in “A Few Good Men” good men and true, who are the only guardians between civilization as we know it and those hordes of demonic zombies ready to eat the flesh off our bones – uh, I mean our enemies, the Islamofascist terrorists led by that tall guy with the beard and seriously bad kidneys.
One individual who the “Torture works, dammit!” crowd relied upon to support their adamant belief in the right to violate all norms of civilized behavior in defense of the best and last hope of mankind was John Kiriakou, a former CIA official during the Bush years. Back in December of 2007, he gave ABC News an interview in which he defended waterboarding as necessary in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, even if he now found the practice to be unseemly. To quote his own words at the time:
In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique, [i.e., waterboarding] broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.
“The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate,” said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News With Charles Gibson” and “Nightline.”
“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”
Devastating testimony, if true, and reason enough for many people to hold their nose (or gleefully sit back and say “I told you so”) and agree that, this time at least, cruel and unusual punishment prohibited under the US Constitution, and a practice for which Allied tribunals after WWII condemned Japanese “enemy combatants” as war criminals because they used it against American prisoners of war, an interrogation technique for which Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice put a Texas Sheriff and three of his deputies in prison for using on a suspect in their custody, that “technique” which clearly violated American and international law, was justified. After all, we had it straight from one of the “good guys” up on that that wall defending us from the “evil doers” that torture had saved American lives from “dozens of attacks” by crazed homicidal maniacs pledged to destroy us in the name of converting the world to the one true faith in Allah.
Too bad it was all just one big lie fabricated to justify doing the unspeakable in our collective name.
In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government’s use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.
Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”
His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.”
Think on that for a moment. This lying bastard (my opinion which you are free to share or not) told millions of gullible Americans that all it took was 35 seconds of waterboarding to turn Abu Zubaydeh into a walking, talking confession machine, willing to give up all of the details of “dozens of terrorist plots” planned by Al Qaeda against America. Thirty-five seconds. Now divide those 35 seconds by the number 83, the known number of separate incidents of waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah by his interrogators. You know what you get? Waterboarding sessions which lasted an average of .42 seconds. Does that sound believable to you? Any part of it? Of course not.
And it was all phony information that came from someone who had not actually witnessed these waterboarding session of the dangerous terrorist Zubaydeh. He was literally “the man who wasn’t there,” a spokesperson whose only knowledge about the vaunted success of the Bush torture regime came from reports he read secondhand! Yet our vast right wing nation of morans jumped on the bandwagon loudly proclaiming that here was the proof that torture was a good thing, that it provided the “security” that validated America selling its collective soul to the Devil of expediency.
During the heated debate in 2007 over the use of waterboarding and other techniques, Mr. Kiriakou’s comments quickly ricocheted around the media. But lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand knowledge of the waterboarding: He was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field.
On “World News,” ABC included only a caveat that Mr. Kiriakou himself “never carried out any of the waterboarding.” Still, he told ABC that the actions had “disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.” A video of the interview was no longer on ABC’s website.
“It works, is the bottom line,” Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the next day. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.” […]
In the days after Mr. Kiriakou’s media blitz, his claims were repeated by an array of other outlets. For instance, the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace cited the 35 seconds claim to ask a congressman whether the interrogation program was “really so bad.”
Months later the claims continued to be amplified; the National Review editor Jonah Goldberg used Mr. Kiriakou’s assertions in a column last year to argue that the waterboarding was “right and certainly defensible.”
No Rush, it didn’t work. Not in 35 seconds. Not after 83 times in which Zubaydah thought he was going to be drowned. Not at all. All the verifiable, valuable information about Al Qaeda we got from Abu Zubaydeh came before we tortured him. Before we nearly drowned him 83 fricking times. Before we abandoned tried and true methods of interrogation honed for decades by FBI and military interrogation experts in favor of medieval methods used to coerce false confessions by immoral, sadistic tyrannical regimes. Like Communist China during the Korean War. Like the Japanese militarists during WWII. Like the members of the Catholic Church who participated in the Inquisition in the 1500’s. All that waterboarding of Abu Zubaydeh gave us was a bunch of crap. Stuff that didn’t save one American life, much less prevent an attack on American soil. We got a bunch of minimally useful information at best, fantasies and lies at worst. Because that’s what the continuous torture of a prisoner gives you: whatever the individual being tortured thinks you want to hear.
“Torture gets people to talk — no question,” says a former senior U.S. national security official involved in such matters. “They talk and talk and talk, until you stop hurting them. But in every instance, bar none, you later discover that they’ve just been lying or exaggerating, or telling you what they think you want to hear.” In fact, a 1963 CIA interrogation manual warned that those resisting questioning “are likely to become intractable if made to endure pain” or generate “false, concocted as a means of escaping from distress.”
So why did we torture? Why do so many on the right defend the practice? Do they still believe that torture works, or do they just like the idea that someone was suffering horribly as payback for 9/11, as revenge, (even if we now know that American military and intelligence operatives who acted as interrogators of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gitmo and who knows where else around the world abused and even killed innocent people who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, or with the wrong name on the wrong list))? I leave those questions for you to answer. Whatever their reasons, they have little if anything to do with the real effectiveness of torturing people to obtain accurate and timely information of threats to our security.
Because torture is best at providing fake information, not truth. The claim that it is an invaluable intelligence gathering tool is simply just another big lie from the same lying liars who brought you the Iraq War, warrantless surveillance, FBI agents combing through our library records, billions of dollars of fraud and waste, disinformation campaigns directed at the American Public, politically motivated prosecutions of prominent Democrats, the firing of US attorneys for failing to prosecute phony voter fraud cases, the use of government to advance the election campaigns of their own party, spying on Members of Congress, increasing the risk to public health and safety by allowing businesses to release more toxic pollutants into our lakes, rivers and atmosphere, the deaths of miners from inadequate supervision of the mines in which they labored, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.
Frankly it’s sickening to even have to make the case that torture is ineffective, but if that’s the only debate in which these amoral idiots are willing to engage, so be it. Those of us who oppose torture win that one too.
