The Uses of Torture

February 5th, 2015 | http://www.lobelog.com/the-uses-of-torture/#more-27935

by Peter Costantini
“Enhanced interrogation”: the George W. Bush administration bureaucrats who coined the term had perfect pitch. The apparatchiks of Kafka’s Castle would have admired the grayness of the euphemism. But although it sounds like some new kind of focus group, it turns out that “enhanced interrogation” was just anodyne branding for good old-fashioned torture.
Unfortunately, the debate around it unleashed by the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has largely missed the point.
Certainly, the report provided overwhelming evidence that torture did not produce useful intelligence. The CIA had concluded previously that torture is “ineffective,” “counterproductive,” and “will probably result in false answers.” Some CIA agents and soldiers reportedly questioned the legality of the “enhanced interrogation” policies and resisted carrying them out. FBI agent Ali Soufan, who had legally interrogated prisoner Ali Zubaydah, has written that Zubaydah had cooperated and provided “important actionable intelligence” months before he was tortured extensively.
Historian Gareth Porter has used new evidence from the Senate report to refute the CIA’s claim that information obtained through torture “played a substantial role” in locating and killing al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The CIA, he says, deceived the U.S. government and public on this point. In fact, Porter contends, the identification of bin Laden’s courier, which eventually led U.S. forces to bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, “had nothing to do with the CIA torture program.”
Even a Bush Justice Department lawyer has acknowledged: “It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program.” In any case, it is impossible to know that intelligence purportedly extracted by torture could not have been elicited by legal interrogation.
Fundamentally, though, whether torture “works” or not is immaterial. http://www.lobelog.com/the-uses-of-torture/#more-27935