the angel of abu ghraib

Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. (Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovski)

There is a lot to turn the stomach of any thinking person about the current debate over detainee legislation in Washington, but the part of it all that really frosts me is the simple fact that torture as a method of interrogation has been discounted again and again and again throughout history.  Retired CIA officer Larry Johnson, in conjunction with 16 other intelligence professionals, has posted a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Dear Senators:

We write as experienced intelligence and military officers who have served in the frontlines in waging war against communism and Islamic extremism. We fully support the need for proactive operations to identify and disrupt those individuals and organizations who wish to harm our country or its people. We also recognize that intelligence operations, unlike law enforcement initiatives, enjoy more flexibility and less scrutiny, but at the same time must continue to be guided by applicable US law.

(snip)

Apart from the moral considerations, we believe it is important that the Congress send a clear message that torture is not an effective or useful tactic. As noted recently by the head of Army Intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons:

No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.

Is this clear?  NO GOOD INTELLIGENCE IS GOING TO COME FROM ABUSIVE PRACTICES.  Why?  Because people will say anything to stop the pain.  And you end up sending the US military charging into Iraq on a fool’s errand looking for non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction.

"Well, damn!" says Dick Cheney, "When we shot a hundred volts into that guy’s testicles, he SWORE there were WMD’s here!  What can possibly have gone wrong?"

Doesn’t anyone but me see the problem here?  Just for a moment, let’s put aside the moral question and look at the question of torture from a purely cold-blooded strategic standpoint.  Pretend for just a moment that you don’t care about the toll abusive interrogation techniques take on prisoners and their captors and all you care about is getting good information.  Torture still doesn’t make sense as a policy because it nets FALSE INFORMATION.  And presuming that you really care what happens to our country, bad information is precisely what you don’t want.

From that essay by Vladimir Bukovsky in the Washington Post: 

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it."

Name three intelligence successes we can attribute to the Bush Administration.  Just three.

"Well," says Preznint Clusterfuck, "all I can tell you is that we’ve stopped attacks.  The rest is a secret.  National security."

Right.  How come any and every time we need any hard evidence from you lying fucks, you can’t tell us because it would endanger "National Security"?  Oh, and those seven morons living in a warehouse in Miami don’t count.  They were keeping their neighbors awake doing "combat training" in the middle of the night, so the neighborhood people called the police.  That’s not an intelligence operation.  That’s a noise complaint. 

The Bush administration haven’t got the first clue how to fight terrorists.  They don’t understand that "intelligence gathering" means getting clues and information about things that are ACTUALLY HAPPENING, not waterboarding a Canadian tourist until he confesses to being Osama Bin Laden’s personal masseur to make you stop.   

Which is exactly what happened.  I think we all understand that in the run-up to the Iraq War, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were applying direct pressure to the intelligence agencies to produce evidence that Iraq had WMD’s and that the Hussein regime was a "state sponsor of terrorism".  Again and again, the intel agencies came up dry.  But you know BushCo had a real hard-on for their war, so they told the intel people to keep trying until they got something.  And apparently, someone on a waterboard who hadn’t slept for a week told them what they wanted to hear.  Never mind that it wasn’t true!  We got the answer we needed!  LET’S INVADE THOSE BITCHEZ!!  KILL!!  KILL!!  KILL!! 

And it is prosecution for these war crimes that the administration is trying so desperately to escape, even if that means mangling our Constitution and the Geneva Conventions in the process.  200 years of democratic precedent destroyed so they can try to make their crimes retroactively legal.  It has nothing to do with interrogating the people we may capture in the future.  It has nothing to do with keeping our country safe.  It has to do with Dick and Don and George trying to keep their smug white asses in power and out of jail.

Does everyone understand that?  This new legislation not only compromises our values and clears the way for future generations of US soldiers to be tortured, illegally detained, and speciously tried, IT DOES ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO MAKE THE UNITED STATES LESS VULNERABLE TO TERRORIST ATTACKS.  If anything, it makes us even more vulnerable as more and more disaffected radicals of all political and ideological affiliations become hardened against us.  Tony Snow maintains that not everyone who becomes alligned with Osama Bin Laden will actually strap on a suicide belt, but SOME of them will.

To me, this is the money quote from Bukovsky’s essay:

When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods…

And given the massive migration of experienced intelligence professionals away from the CIA and FBI, I think that’s exactly what we’re seeing.  So, not only are Bush administration policies creating more terrorists around the world, they’re taking away the tools to fight them that we do have.

I feel safer already!