Your second quoted sentence is correct: even Bush and Cheney lied to claim we did not use torture.
As to the rest: meh.
Showing that we actually got useful information after torturing someone fails to defend the torture because we do not know that we would have failed to get the information without torture. It also fails to take into account the number of recruits that we promoted for the enemy who might have stayed neutral had their family or friends not been tortured (and murdered) and the numbers of civilians and our troops who were tortured and murdered in retaliation.
It is always possible that any given torture of an individual provided some reliable information, but even that information remains suspect in the fog of false statements made by those who are attempting to escape pain. The only thing that Cheney’s call could do would be to provide a clear example of confirmation bias. Look! We got these three pieces of useful information among the 20,000 false leads from several hundred tortured prisoners! It works!
There’s an old joke: A man is sitting in a pub nursing a pint and looking down. A fellow pub patron asks him why he looks so glum, chum. The man says:
"For 10 years as a child I made model airplanes that I sold to neighborhood children. But do they call me John the Airpane Maker? No.
As a young adult, I worked as a carpenter and I did repairs on every house in the county. But do they call me John the Carpenter? No.
I ultimately made my living in construction, building bridges over every river in this part of the country. But do they call me John the Bridge Builder? No.
But you fuck one goat …"
Do you really think Bush and everybody else through the chain of command would have approved something like waterboarding if all other options hadn’t already been exhausted?
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times (He must have been one tough SOB). If a guy can put up with 183 waterboardings, what other means do you think would be successful? He finally gave up the al Queda leader in Britain, as well as lots of other stuff.
The means that have been used for decades in this country, and worked with him: fucking talking to him. Bashing a guy’s head against a concrete wall is much less effective than making him feel like you’re on his side and he should tell you what he knows. Although then you don’t get to feel like Jack Bauer.
Cites? Proof? That “…as well as lots of other stuff…” cries out for clarification. Oh, yeah.
Because the impression forming in my mind is not that these guys (him and Zubaydah) are innocent lambs, but that they were presented to us as being high-value targets when they were no such thing. How many times have we been lied to about these things? How many times have they killed/captured the “number 3 AlQ leader” in wherever? Remember when they said they had wiped out 75% of AlQ leadership?
Here’s what I think happened: BushCo convinced themselves that these guys were the bee’s knees, the Big Kauhunas. They trumpeted their capture as being proof of their wisdom and power, but intelligence was not flowing in the gushing torrent they expected. “Well, that is clearly proof that they are holding back some very heavy stuff! Because we already know that they are very heavy players! Hell, KSM already confessed to plotting 9/11 AND kidnapping the Lindbergh Baby! Better apply some more torture, get them to give up what they are hiding!”
I think the picture thats developing is that these guys were just a couple of AlQ shmucks of no particular importance, and the poor dumb bastards were being tortured for refusing to give up what they didn’t have in the first place!
According to a recent book by reporter Ron Suskind of the WaPost (Shadow War, Simon and Shuster)…
So. They tell Bush “Mr. President, this guys is barking mad and doesn’t know shit.” And what does Bush tell us? “[O]ne of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.”
You want me to believe a word these guys say? Catch them telling the truth would be a good start.
Cheney and his underlings invaded Iraq without exhausting all the other options, leading predictably to the deaths of thousands. If he and his minions did that, then I suspect they regarded torture as the first option, not the last.
Actually, it is only 14 if you 1) accept that we have admitted to every act we committed and 2) accept only the narrowest definition of torture and 3) limit it to only Guatanamo.
Given the number of prisoners abused at Abu Ghraib and other locations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a less (arbitrarily) restricted definition of torture, combined with the fact that there are probably incidents that contain information we still do not want released, hundreds is probably a better estimate. I would agree that thousands might be too broad–we probably have not yet captured enough prisoners to reach that number.
When the CIA started getting involved, they were met with objections from both the FBI and the military guys who were doing the initial questioning. It is clear from several accounts that the CIA decided to “jump start” a process that was well under way without the use of torture.
I doubt that Bush and Cheney actually got their hands dirty approving any specific torture; they simply accepted reports from underlings that we needed to “get tough,” had their pet lawyers disgrace themselves with erratic and wholly contrived opinions, and issued a “make it so” declaration.
Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day, so statistically speaking sooner or later he’ll fuck up and tell the truth if even by accident (albeit not in this case). “In the interests of national security,” is the “Won’t someone think of the children?” of the 2000s; a generic, all-purpose, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger rationalization for any occasion.
At this point, Dick Cheney is less relevant to national politics than Brittany Spears. And the, “We’ve had espionage successes to offset our bullshit failures” argument used by CIA apologists for all manner of infractions is more tired than a marathoner at mile 22. One can only imagine how they’ll cherry pick the “successes” and keep the manifest failures classified. Declassify the whole lot of intelligence about Iraq and the subsequent occupation (little of which can be terribly relevant at this point to future operations) or leave it all black. This releasing of select memos generated by a bunch of arse-licking REMFs is just waving a monkey puppet at the American public.
Not one person has actually addressed the meat of Cheney’s complaint.
Cheney says the release of the torture memos without the release of the valuable information obtained by the techniques in question presents an unbalanced picture, and is therefore calling for the release of that information.
There’s a huge amount of discussion on how wrong Cheney always is, on whether or not torture does actually work, and how bad it was to invade Iraq.
No one has answered the basic question. by releasing the torture techniques details without also releasing any success stories, is an unbalanced or unfair inference created? Why or why not?
(Note for the reflexive responders: I don’t take a position on the question. I just note that it hasn’t been directly addressed.)
Actually it’s even worse than that.
They tell Bush “he’s barking mad and doesn’t know shit”, Bush says “he’s a terrorist mastermind” AND THEN orders the CIA guys to torture him for info. Which they do. Even though they know for fact that he’s barking mad and doesn’t know shit. How’s that for a mindfuck ?
I wonder if they somehow managed to convinced themselves he really was a terrorist mastermind between the time the info went up, and the time garbage came back down. After all, we are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
ETA :
That gave me a laugh. “Mr. Cheney, what color is the sky, please ?” “Blue. NO ! Fuck ! Red ! God dammit.”