On what basis do you think there *were *any “success stories”? :dubious: Don’t you think Cheney would have told us about them, crowing with pride, while he was taking far more heat than he is now - if there actually were some?
So what is *your *basis for thinking that the presumption that he’s not telling the truth could be unfair or unbalanced?
This is a disgusting sentiment, and your attempt to paint an equivalency between deliberate torture and casualties due to missile strikes is not defensible.
I mean, we can’t simply say “Whoops - we really tried not to torture people, and we made every effort not to waterboard a bunch of suspects, but hey, accidents happen. The wet towels just slipped out of my hand and landed all over the guys face. We mistakenly piled naked prisoners up into a pyramid by accident.”
Source: Despite Claim, Cheney Didn’t Really Ask CIA To Release Torture Intelligence
If Cheney’s lying about this, a reasonable person might conclude that that he might not be truthful in the rest of what he said either.
The hell you say.
The hell, I DO! 
And similarly, if there was some slamdunk evidence of this, don’t you think they would’ve rushed such a case to trial so they could make grand political theater out of how effective torture works? Or is it just possible that these methods don’t actually hold up to scrutiny in the eye of the law?
THIS would be an excellent example of analyzing the question and presenting a conclusion based on that analysis.
On behalf on Reasoned Debate, Richard Parker, I thank you.
From Andrew Sullivan today:
So far, my best guess is Cheney is bluffing. First clue? He wants the memos for his “memoirs”. (Which will likely do for mendacity what a thermonuclear bomb does for “hot”.) Note, he’s not taking part in the unseemly debate swirling about, he has more lofty conerns.
But by specifying (actually, by not specifying…) which documents he refers to, he invites us to believe that he is personally aware of their existence. And if his request is refused, he is left standing, batting big brown innocent eyes, denied the evidence that would prove his case.
And note the venue: Sean Hannity, who not only can be expected to throw him Nerf balls, but to throw like a girl.
Mine is that he’s trying to dissuade Obama, via the press and a public opinion that includes a large helping of its own enablers’ guilt, from having Holder open a formal investigation of him and Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales, et al. The results can only be severely negative for them in all aspects, but if the thing gets underway anyway, there’ll be no stopping it.
In addition to the whole question of the morality of torture itself (which I see no need to address further), there’s a deep issue of intellectual honesty here. Yeah, some of the victims probably did say some things that were true, and most of them probably didn’t. But it’s not even a matter of finding the gems of truth hidden in amongst the mounds of “bad” information. We don’t even have contaminated information here: We actually have no information at all.
To elaborate: Suppose I capture 100 prisoners, all of them innocent. I ask all of them for some piece of information, with some incentive for them to answer (not even necessarily torture: I could offer rewards for the talkers, for instance). Let’s say, for instance, that I ask every one of them for the name of the city in which the chief of Al Qaeda’s operations in Iraq is hiding. None of them actually knows, since none of them are actually involved with AQ, so they all just name an Iraqi city at random. Clearly, I don’t have any information, here, since the only place I could have gotten it from is from the prisoners, and none of them had any information, either.
But now, suppose that a week later, the troops on the ground manage to actually capture that leader I was asking about in some city or another. Just by random chance, it’s likely that a few of my interrogees named that city. So now, I can selectively declassify just those interviews, and show the nation two or three different prisoners saying that so-and-so is hiding in such-and-such a city, just where we found him. Absent any other information, it now looks like my interrogation method (whatever it was) yielded useful information, when in fact it yielded not even low-quality information, but none at all. And the only way to make that evident would be to release all of the data: Not just the two or three that guessed right, but the 97 or 98 who guessed wrong.
The reason that the president needed to OK the missile strikes is that they were launched against sites in our ostensible ally, Pakistan. That requires top authority. Strikes are carried out within Afghanistan that do not require presidential approval.
My guess is that to the extent the president was included in the loop for the piracy event, it had more to do with the news exposure and the fact that it occurred on the high seas. (At one point, the Bainbridge was towing the lifeboat within 8 miles of the coast and I doubt that Somalia adheres to a 3 mile limit when 12 and 200 mile limits are the norm.)
Worse, Somalia doesn’t even seem to have an actual government.
Chronos, in your scenario, we’re actually worse off than if we had no information. If we place any credibility in anything these guys are blurting out to make the pain stop, we divert resources from following credible information to hunt all those wild geese. Further, the fact of granting credibility to such information tends to reduce the credibility ascribed to the good stuff, eventually making it all appear to be just noise.
That would be my main point, yes. Beyond that, however, we have the fact that the previous administration got lawyers to rationalize torture. I do think those opinions should be exposed and debated publicly so that no future administration can dig them up, classify them, then use them to excuse future tortures. For that to happen we do need to know the actual opinions expressed, but we do not need to know whether they met some vague standard of success. (We really do not even need to know that they actually led to torture for the purpose of debating the quality of their legal assertions.)
What exactly is a “formal request”, anyway? Is it somehow more significant than an “informal request”?
According to this fellow, Greg Sargent,
Further, from the same Greg Sargent…
Well… maybe.
By that I mean that if the techniques involved are found to be clearly against the law, then you’re right: the quality of their legal assertions is not changed by what revelations ensued. But if the techniques are found to be legal, then the debate turns to whether those techniques are ethical, moral, wise, or useful. It seems to me that information about how successful they are might be relevent in any debate along those lines.
And now that I think about it, suppose the debate is framed as: should those illegal techniques be explicitly made legal? That is, should the US enshrine torture in the law? It seems to me that the usefulness of the technique is relevant for that debate, too.
Perhaps it’s a “my cheque is in the mail” situation. Mr Cheney wrote out a nice letter to the CIA, put some stamps on it, and mailed it to them, but freedom-hating Commie Muslim stooges working for the Post Office intercepted his letter, burned it, and forwarded the ashes to Al Qaeda headquarters as a memento.
What makes you think that isn’t clear already? Come on now.
But that does not mean Cheney would not ask for them to be released anyway, because that puts the Obama administration in the impossible position of proving a negative. In other words, just because Cheny asked for them to be released, is no evidence that the memos even exist.
Yes, but I am not sure what it would prove. Certainly not that torture achieves ends that less rigorous interrogation cannot.
Update: It has been reported (if anyone cares) that Cheney did, in fact, make a request to the National Archives to request declassification from whomsoever it may concern. So, never mind.