ALL ABOUT BIN LADEN (4 OF 6): THIS PROVES TORTURE IS GOOD

From Dan Froomkin:

Torture May Have Slowed Hunt For Bin Laden, Not Hastened It

Defenders of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago.

But that sequence of events -- even if true -- doesn’t demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly.

"I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden," said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.

It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier -- information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, "they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us," Alexander told The Huffington Post.

"We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information," he said.

In a 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College, trained interrogators found that traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches are extremely effective with even the most hardened detainees, whereas coercion consistently builds resistance and resentment.

More here.

From the AP via Yahoo:

McCain: Torture did not lead to bin Laden death

McCain said he asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and that the hunt for bin Laden did not begin with fresh information from Mohammed. In fact, the name of bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, came from a detainee held in another country.

"Not only did the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not provide us with key leads on bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed, it actually produced false and misleading information," McCain said. He called on Mukasey and others to correct their misstatements.

More here.

And from the Daily Kos:

Rumsfeld flips on efficacy of torture for finding Osama bin Laden.

Less than a day after he said the Defense Department that he then headed did not gain critical information about Osama bin Laden's whereabout by means of "harsh treatment," as Joan McCarter discussed here, he was singing a different tune Tueday night on Foxaganda's Sean Hannity Show, with Hannity himself cheerleading the role of extraordinary rendition, CIA black sites and torture.

Of course, not being a guy who ever admits he was wrong, Rumsfeld applied his usual tortuous parsing in order to join the deluge of right wingers claiming that the torture they refuse to admit was torture was crucial in locating and killing bin Laden.

Click here for the rest.

So, of course, this is a fatally flawed argument from the get-go. It is essentially the old "ends justify the means" point of view, which civilized peoples have dismissed for generations. That is, no matter what beneficial results torture might produce, the practice of inflicting pain and suffering on imprisoned or incapacitated individuals is heinously immoral. There is no justification for it. Torture is always wrong, under all circumstances.

Okay, I might consider the so-called "ticking timebomb scenario" as something of a complication, but where does such a situation exist outside of Jack Bauer's fictional television world? And more generally, how does one even know that he's actually in the "ticking timebomb scenario"? This is an academic discussion dealing with unlikely hypothetical situations. For all intents and purposes, torture is wrong, immoral, and a crime against humanity. People who believe in the foundational ideals of this nation reject it as an option immediately.

So, in the most important ways, this is a stupid discourse. It doesn't matter whether intelligence information gained from inflicting cruelty on individuals who have been rendered harmless led to OBL's killing. Torture is deeply immoral, and bin Laden's death doesn't change that.

But it's definitely worth noting that torture, specifically the Chinese/North Korean communist variety, which was originally designed to elicit false confessions from American POWs, and which is now used by the United States against Muslim captives, is just plain counterproductive. In short, this kind of torture gets victims to tell their torturers what they want to hear. Not the truth. I mean okay, sometimes you get the truth, or little disconnected bits of it, but not the kind of truth experts say you can get with actual, tried-and-true interrogation techniques that are not morally reprehensible. It is highly unlikely that our brutish torture regime had anything at all to do with bin Laden's death.

Really, what's going on here isn't a debate. Rather, it's a combination of two recent cultural strains coming together at just the right moment. On the one hand, we have the people who came up with the idea of torturing Muslims in the first place, and their ideological supporters, trying to control public discourse in a desperate attempt to hold off what they fear might be eventual prosecutions. I wouldn't worry too much about that if I were them given that the Obama administration has made it achingly clear that there won't be any torture prosecutions, but that's definitely what's going on, an attempt to taint the jury pool, as it were. On the other hand, we also have that bloodthirsty twenty percent or so of the population who just genuinely like the fact that we're torturing brown people chiming in. They don't really give a fuck about intelligence; they simply like hurting brown people. So any justification they can get serves them well--beating the fuck out of brown people is good; it got bin Laden, didn't it?

But more honest conservatives are, well, more honest. Senator McCain, a right-wing asshole if there ever was one, and the only elected Republican who has ever actually been tortured, points out the obvious. And hell, Donald Rumsfeld, who as Bush's Secretary of Defense fully approved of "rough treatment" was against this bin Laden-torture meme before he was for it! Hopefully all this bullshit squawking will die down soon.

Frankly, I'm getting sick of it.

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