How do you measure effectiveness anyway? Even if it worked it does not mean that it is the only way that would have owrked or it was a necessary method to get the information. An effective way to weight loss would be to cut off both your arms, it’s hardly the best or preferred method.
Luckily for you, MSNBC just posted the transcript of the show. Here it is in full. Some choice bits:
Are you looking for info on what was done to prisoners that the CIA held in its secret prisons? Oh, it‘s the Red Cross report that authoritatively exposes that. Are you looking to find out who authorized those techniques for the CIA and how they did it? That would be those memos that were released last week. Are you looking to find out about torture of prisoners not in the CIA secret prisons but in the un-secret prisons run by the military—places like Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib and Bagram? Well, for that information, what you were waiting for was the Senate Armed Services Committee report—which has now been out less than 24 hours. Armed Services Committee means it has to do with military issues, and the military was running the prisons like the one at Guantanamo.
She explains that we’ve been getting two different sets of reports about two different torture programs, one CIA, one military…
And what we have found, and what we can now see—thanks to all this newly-declassified, on-the-record information—is that in these two different things run by two different agencies, we were doing the same things to people when it came to interrogations—things that we never did before. Sticking a prisoner in a cold cell, chain him to the ceiling, sleep deprivation, stress positions—we never did that stuff before. Then all of a sudden, it started happening everywhere—in the CIA prisons, in the military prisons—everywhere.
She dismisses the concept of the “bad apples” and lays the blame where it belongs…
These two things link not at the bottom but at the top. They link in Washington. From the newly-declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report, quote, “Senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”
Before we ever captured a high-ranking terrorism suspect, months before those memos were written that authorize stuff like waterboarding and hanging people from the ceiling, in advance—in advance—senior officials created this program. Not in response to poor results from traditional interrogations, we weren‘t interrogating people yet. But proactively, the torture program was invented.
Comments?
The question I was addressing was whether the impetus came from the CIA or was imposed on them by the CIA, as you implied. What do these quotes show about that?
I take it you mean to say that you are not going to read the provided transcript? I’m interested in hearing your critique of her reasoning.
Personally, I would distinguish between “The CIA” (a large intelligence gathering agency of the US government) and “The Bush Administration appointees in charge of the CIA” (George Tenant and John McLaughlin). That distinction was made abundantly clear when Valerie Plame’s covert status was revealed.
Tenet & McLaughlin were appointed by Bill Clinton. (The latter was a career CIA official.)
But they stayed with Bush. Plenty of people didn’t; one effect of Bush was an exodus from the government of people inflicted with either scruples or competence.