The New York Times: "The killing of Osama bin Laden provoked a host of reactions from Americans: celebration, triumph, relief, closure and renewed grief. One reaction, however, was both cynical and disturbing: crowing by the apologists and practitioners of torture that Bin Laden's death vindicated their immoral and illegal behavior after the Sept. 11 attacks."
File photo, Osama bin Laden. (photo: AP)
The Torture Apologists
05 May 11
he killing of Osama bin Laden provoked a host of reactions from Americans: celebration, triumph, relief, closure and renewed grief. One reaction, however, was both cynical and disturbing: crowing by the apologists and practitioners of torture that Bin Laden's death vindicated their immoral and illegal behavior after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Jose Rodriguez Jr. was the leader of counterterrorism for the CIA from 2002-2005 when Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda leaders were captured. He told Time magazine that the recent events show that President Obama should not have banned so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. (Mr. Rodriguez, you may remember, ordered the destruction of interrogation videos.)
John Yoo, the former Bush Justice Department lawyer who twisted the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions into an unrecognizable mess to excuse torture, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the killing of Bin Laden proved that waterboarding and other abuses were proper. Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, said at first that no coerced evidence played a role in tracking down Bin Laden, but by Tuesday he was reciting the talking points about the virtues of prisoner abuse.
There is no final answer to whether any of the prisoners tortured in President George W. Bush's illegal camps gave up information that eventually proved useful in finding Bin Laden. A detailed account in The Times on Wednesday by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage concluded that torture "played a small role at most" in the years and years of painstaking intelligence and detective work that led a Navy Seals team to Bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan.
That squares with the frequent testimony over the past decade from many other interrogators and officials. They have said repeatedly, and said again this week, that the best information came from prisoners who were not tortured. The Times article said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, fed false information to his captors during torture.
Even if it were true that some tidbit was blurted out by a prisoner while being tormented by CIA interrogators, that does not remotely justify Mr. Bush's decision to violate the law and any acceptable moral standard.
This was not the "ticking time bomb" scenario that Bush-era officials often invoked to rationalize abusive interrogations. If, as Representative Peter King, the Long Island Republican, said, information from abused prisoners "directly led" to the redoubt, why didn't the Bush administration follow that trail years ago?
There are many arguments against torture. It is immoral and illegal and counterproductive. The Bush administration's abuses - and ends justify the means arguments - did huge damage to this country's standing and gave its enemies succor and comfort. If that isn't enough, there is also the pragmatic argument that most experienced interrogators think that the same information, or better, can be obtained through legal and humane means.
No matter what Mr. Yoo and friends may claim, the real lesson of the Bin Laden operation is that it demonstrated what can be done with focused intelligence work and persistence.
The battered intelligence community should now be basking in the glory of a successful operation. It should not be dragged back into the muck and murk by political figures whose sole agenda seems to be to rationalize actions that cost this country dearly - in our inability to hold credible trials for very bad men and in the continued damage to our reputation.
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Comments
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The COSTS of torture are more predictable than the benefits. As for benefits, the extracted information is less reliable than information obtained by other means. As to the costs, they are legion:
One's allies react with distrust and disgust;
The personnel involved are emotionally harmed by it, whether by traumatic guilt or by exercise of pathological sadism;
Any UNCOMMITTED people in the world, who otherwise might have been won over by one's sticking to the moral high ground are shattered (correction: repelled).
Like the little children they are, when upstaged by Obama at their own macho-meathead-vengeance game, they can only fall back — and backward— on a pitiful sliver of unsubstantiated crap to attempt to justify their relentless efforts to drag America down into the putrid filth of the dark side that is torture.
Each and everyone of them is a walking talking Psych 101 case study in neurosis — authoritarian personalities who project their faults on others and overcompensate (for being the wimps their daddies taught them to hate) by sending REAL MEN to fight, die and be mutilated in wars designed to enrich corporatism. But that's not enough for them; they need to TORTURE people as well, like little Jeffry Dahmers pulling wings off flies. They are mentally sick, and they infuse America with their sickness. They should be ridiculed into oblivion, not given a voice in the media.
This is false. You read too much mainstream media. In fact, there were plans to invade Afghanistan before 9-11. They go back to the middle 90s. Read Brzezinski's The Grand Chess Game. He advocated taking all of Central Asia and Afghanistan would only be the first step and become a base from which campaigns in the rest of Central Asia could be a launched. In the summer of 2001 a conference was held in Germany to lay down actual plans for the invasion. It got grafted onto to the hunt for bin Laden after 9-11.
In case you haven't read it, Iran and Syria were the other two countries mentioned for acquisition and colonization.
What else is new?
It appears the U.S. has exacted plenty of revenge, if that is what these attacks on the Middle East really are, in the deaths and homelessness of thousands.
Now that bin Laden is dead there can be no trial nor testimony for the world to hear of his involvement with the US prior to 9/11.
But then, Saddam Hussein's trial was a fiasco. All we heard of his trial was about Saddam's outbursts. Everything else was withheld from the public, like the fact that at one time he was a benefactor of the US. How about his buddy-buddy photos with Donald Rumsfeld? Of course the trial had to be secret. Bush, et al didn't want the world to know about our secret relationship with Saddam and how we supported him. I imagine that the fact that he wanted to switch from the dollar to the euro, which would have devastated the dollar, had a lot to taking out Saddam. Yes, he was a tyrant. But the people had a good standard of living with good education, medical care, etc. Now the country is mired in devastation.
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