Important detail in this NY Times piece on the CIA torture video coverup. The FBI got Abu Zubaydah to give up Khalid Shaikh Mohammed without using torture; then the CIA began torturing him and it’s far from clear that they got anything. Gov’t officials are cited saying:
…Zubaydah, who had been taken to a secret location in Thailand, cooperated with interviewers from the F.B.I., who used a nonconfrontational approach, until C.I.A. interrogators took over the questioning in April or May of 2002 and used more aggressive techniques [i.e., torture – DA].
After the Thailand confrontation, the F.B.I. forbade its agents from taking part in sessions in which harsh methods were used. In his early F.B.I. interviews, Abu Zubaydah, who had been severely wounded during his capture, identified Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks. […]
The argument for torture to gain information that will save American lives has always been bogus, but this spells it out very plainly: non-torture, not torture, led the U.S. to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
Fred Thompson answered questions about torture from Wolf Blitzer a couple of weeks ago. He said that torture goes against U.S. values and that we should definitely stick to international agreements, except when there are “extreme circumstances,” in which case new policies might need to be formulated.
Thompson’s campaign will not last, but his argument very definitely will. It is crafted to seem like an anti-torture argument, as pragmatic as can be, but it is in fact a pro-torture argument and a defense of Bush administration policy. Dig beneath the surface and it is pure doublespeak: The U.S. must not use torture, except when it must. The U.S. must obey int’l agreements, except when it shouldn’t. Those agreements, by the way, do not allow for “extreme circumstances,” because the extreme-circumstances argument is phony, a cynical excuse cooked up by people in power who lack the scruples they pretend to have.
Andrew Sullivan’s latest cri de coeur is here:
The defenders of torture are always saying that it can be used “judiciously” and in extremely limited circumstances, that it can be controlled within the executive branch; that it need not metastasize into a broader policy, and need not trickle down to others. But from all the facts we now know, this executive decision to rescind the Geneva Conventions began with cases that were already beneath the “ticking time bomb” scenario, and within months spread like wildfire across every theater of combat, including every major branch of the armed services, leading to scores of deaths in interrogation, almost casual if brutal torture of (often innocent) suspects in Afghanistan and Iraq, secret torture sites in Eastern Europe, God knows what in outsourced torture in the grim redoubts of Uzbek, Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian police states, and, of course, the excrescence of Abu Ghraib, which Bush had the gall to say he had nothing to do with.
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