Torture Kills

The following is from Andrew Sullivan, summarizing what might be the most critical argument against torture. It references the work of Charles Savage and his Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Takeover." It outlines why this administration is so dangerous. Because it is so reckless, and arrogant, and stupid!

"The torture techniques authorized by Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney are not just immoral and illegal; they are a terrible threat to our national security. Why? Because they originated as a means to extract false confessions in totalitarian societies, not as a means to gain actual, workable intelligence, i.e. anything we might hope to think of as the truth. Many of the techniques were mirror images of techniques that American soldiers had been trained to resist if captured by Viet Cong or North Korean or Soviet thugs - the famous SERE training. They had also, of course, been used by the Nazis. Yes, these torture methods, in most cases, left no physical marks - precisely so that captured American soldiers could be shown on television giving confessions as if they were volunteering real information. But they were lying, of course, because torture forced them to lie. And so, in an unknowable number of cases, have the torture-victims of the Bush administration. One thing I'd forgotten, of course, is one central case in which torture did give us actionable intelligence:

"Al Qaeda continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction... I can trace the story of a sernior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained and he has told his story."

The man who spoke those words was Colin Powell at the UN. The "operative", we now know, was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi. He was waterboarded and given Bush-approved hypothermia treatment, i.e. frozen till he could take it no longer. It was only then that he told of al Qaeda's links with Saddam's WMDs. Guess what? Libbi subsequently retracted his confession. According to ABC News, the CIA subsequently found al-Libbi "had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment." So I now realize that part of the reason I believed the WMD case for war against Saddam was because the Bush administration had been secretly torturing suspects and got false confessions. The biggest intelligence failure in recent US history - the WMD case in Iraq - was partly created by the torture policy.

The same story is true of another tortured prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, as recounted in Ron Suskind's book."

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