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About that David Rose piece for Vanity Fair I mentioned: really, give it a read. Rose patiently tracks how the collapse of Jose Padilla’s prosecution begins with the detention and torture of a recovering heroin addict named Binyam Mohammed. When Rose asks FBI Director Robert Mueller if any terrorist attacks on the U.S. were disrupted because of torture, Mueller replies, "I don’t believe that has been the case." And there’s a special guest appearance by Libby-and-Blagojevich-hunter Pat Fitzgerald, who accompanies an FBI agent in 1998 to Morocco to interrogate a terrorist. (Interestingly nicknamed "Joe The Moroccan.") They secure his testimony — and use it to convict his accomplices — without laying a finger on him.
And in light of the controversy over John Brennan and finding a new leadership for the intelligence community untainted by torture, consider carefully what this anonymous CIA official tells Rose:
“We were done a tremendous disservice by the administration,” one official says. “We had no background in this; it’s not something we do. They stuck us with a totally unwelcome job and left us hanging out to dry. I’m worried that the next administration is going to prosecute the guys who got involved, and there won’t be any presidential pardons at the end of it. It would be O.K. if it were John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales. But it won’t be. It’ll be some poor G.S.-13 [bureaucrat] who was just trying to do his job.”
You wouldn’t approve of treating Lynndie England or Charles Graner as the architects of torture at Abu Ghraib, would you?
Finally, here’s something that rarely gets discussed in all the talk about intelligence failures from 9/11 to Iraq. Best intelligence practices say torture is an unreliable method for yielding useful information. Yet intelligence analysts who had to craft assessments from the debriefs of captured Al Qaeda operatives were left without any way of knowing that the basis for their reports was unreliable:
"We didn’t know he’d been waterboarded and tortured when we did that analysis, and the reports were marked as credible as they could be,” the former Pentagon analyst tells me. “The White House knew he’d been tortured. I didn’t, though I was supposed to be evaluating that intelligence.” To draw conclusions about the importance of what Abu Zubaydah said without knowing this crucial piece of the background nullified the value of his work. “It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective. I cannot believe that the president and vice president did not know who was being waterboarded, and what was being given up.”
That’s pretty much designing failure into the architecture of intelligence work. If the point of the torture is, as Dick Cheney says, to yield reliable information — leave aside the actual relationship between torture and unreliable information — it’s nonsensical to exclude such a crucial data point from intelligence analysts. The only reason to do so is to protect the torture program from outraged CIA or Pentagon analysts who might blow the whistle to an inspector-general, or to Congress, or to the press. And at that point it’s clear that good intelligence work isno longer what’s at issue here.
Crossstitched to The Streak.
Tags: looooooooong war
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I’ve been reading these stories related to Cheney’s recent bout of boasting about his horrific assaults on America and Americans, under the guise of “protecting” America and the main thought that keeps recurring is that Cheney’s ‘defend America’ logic applies perfectly to .. Dick Cheney.
He’s been responsible for the needless and pointless death of thousands of Americans. Probably more than Osama Bin Laden. He knows the particulars of the planning that went into their deaths and the deaths of probably hundreds of thousands of people – that level rivaling the worst actions of Sadam Hussein. He also knows his accomplices who might well still be embedded right now in the highest reaches of American government.
So by Cheney’s own logic he’s probably the prime candidate for renditioning and enhanced interrogation along with imprisonment until all his accomplices and followers can be captured and neutralized.
Certainly there’s far more proof of Cheney’s crimes against humanity and the dangers of future crimes against America and Americans than there was for Saddam Hussein. As Cheney would say, there is “in fact” “no doubt” that Dick Cheney and his henchmen are preparing for another major attack on the American system of democracy.
Really. I wish I could say this is a joke but there’s far more reality to any sense of justification for Obama to order the CIA or a Blackwater type team to pick up Cheney and get the facts he surely knows so that America can remain safe.
And this is ignoring the actual history of repeated Republican criminality while in office from the Nixon, Ford and Reagan years, when little action was taken to punish the criminals for their crimes against America. It’s far more likely that these people will, in the future, repeat their criminal attacks on America than it is that Bin Laden will attack America or that Saddam Hussein would have attacked America.