"I've personally been told that they happen but I have to admit that in the years, in now the decade I have been told about it, I have become increasingly skeptical," says terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman.
--snip--
"A ticking bomb becomes a default assumption which in turn becomes a legitimization or justification for torture," Hoffman says today, nearly 10 years after he heard the story. "And in actual fact, even though people have told me about it, I have yet to see an actual documented case independently of what I was told."
To be "fair and balanced" (please sue me, FOXNews . . .)
Former CIA agent Michael Scheuer is convinced that there are times when torture is required. He recently spoke to NPR's Michel Martin and said that he happened "to know that at least until 2004 these activities were very productive, broke up plots aimed at our allies, and aimed against the domestic United States."
Except, of course, specifics aren't cited . . .
Details on what interrogators actually got from techniques like waterboarding are sketchy. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that the first man the U.S. waterboarded, an al-Qaida operative named Abu Zubaydah, was unhelpful until the rough stuff began.
The FBI remembers it differently. The bureau says it took just two weeks for Zubaydah to provide information on Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, without the use of aggressive tactics. Rohan Guaratna agrees. He's an al-Qaida expert who has worked with both the CIA and the FBI and is very familiar with Zubaydah's case.
"Abu Zabaydah told the name of KSM before the enhanced techniques were used," says Guaratna.
All those people who pose hypotheticals derived from 24 and badly written French suspense novels (see the link for details) shouldn't be taken seriously. The issue isn't hypothetical. Indeed, precisely because both the FBI and military refused to torture, while the CIA did so, we have a classic experiment - with control groups and everything - and can test the efficacy of torture. So far not a single verifiable example of quicker, better, actionable intelligence gained through torture has come to light. The CIA officer who insists that potential attacks in the US and Europe were thwarted by torture refuses to discuss them. As far as I'm concerned, either put up or shut up.
BTW, Michael Hayden and that CIA guy who say that torture is sometimes necessary? Moral monsters. They deserve jail, to say the least.
This is the best line of the whole story:
"What I get most out of the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohamed is that any approach — I don't care what it is — if you have to do it 183 times, it is not working," says Matthew Alexander. He was the military interrogator in charge of the team that ended up finding al-Qaida's No. 1 man in Iraq, without resorting to torture.
Indeed.
Of course, we all bear responsibility for this, because it was done in our names. Any torture supporters want to go to Pakistan, say, and defend our right to torture people? Anyone?
