... And the Torture Goes On

Oh yes - Gitmo is really more like a boy scout camp than it is a prison camp. Why, it is practically Disney Land!

Not. At. All.

Nonetheless - it is no wonder that nearly half of America actually approves of torture.

In the meantime, as the following article discusses, torture keeps on going, and going and going ...

Need I mention that I am sick to my stomach with this - and then some?

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Truth Is Out on CIA and Torture
Spy Agency Continues to Carry Out White House Policy

By Milt Bearden

The Truth is Out

Over the last several months, there has been a gradual, but unrelenting, outing of the highest level U.S. government involvement in the sordid business of torture. CIA Director Michael V. Hayden admitted, in his February testimony before Congress, that the Central Intelligence Agency used a technique known as waterboarding on three high-profile Al Qaeda detainees. He also said the CIA had not used the technique in five years -- though the administration seems to be asserting that the agency can use it, when necessary.

President George W. Bush told ABC News in April, "I'm aware our national-security team met on this issue. And I approved.” The president was referring to reports that the National Security Council’s “principals committee” -- the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the head of the NSC and the CIA director -- discussed and approved the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking with Google employees in Mountain View, Calif., in May, said, “after Sept. 11, whatever was legal in the face of not just the attacks of Sept. 11, but the anthrax attacks that happened, we were in an environment in which saving America from the next attack was paramount.” She added, “there has been a long evolution in American policy about detainees and about interrogations...we now have in place a law that was not there in 2002 and 2003.”

In just the last few weeks, a parade of White House, Defense Dept. and CIA lawyers have squirmed before hostile Congressional committees, giving testimony eerie in its clinical treatment of what most of the world thinks is torture. The hearings produced countless stunning quotes, but one attributed to a CIA lawyer stands out: "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

Indeed, they have been doing it wrong. But they all say they are doing it for us -- for the protection of the American people.

Throughout this ugly drama, U.S. leaders have assured the public that the extreme interrogation measures used on detainees have thwarted acts of terrorist and saved thousands of American lives. The trouble with such claims is that professionals who know something of interrogation or intelligence don’t believe them. This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work -- it doesn’t -- but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.

The administration’s claims of having “saved thousands of Americans” can be dismissed out of hand because credible evidence has never been offered -- not even an authoritative leak of any major terrorist operation interdicted based on information gathered from these interrogations in the past seven years. All the public gets is repeated references to Jose Padilla, the Lakawanna Six, the Liberty Seven and the Library Tower operation in Los Angeles. If those slapstick episodes are the true character of the threat, then maybe we’ll be okay after all.

When challenged on the lack of a game-changing example of a derailed operation, administration officials usually say that the need to protect sources and methods prevents revealing just how enhanced interrogation techniques have saved so many thousands of Americans. But it is irresponsible for any administration not to tell a credible story that would convince critics at home and abroad that this torture has served some useful purpose.

More damage is done to U.S. national security by “protecting” the sources and methods than by revealing a couple. So why not just sacrifice a few sources or methods to get at least Washington's closest friends to cut us some slack, and perhaps even knock some foes off balance?

Certainly, the Reagan administration understood the rational limits of protecting intelligence sources and methods when it confronted skeptical world opinion after the U.S. attack on Tripoli in retaliation for the 1986 bombing at the La Belle Disco in Berlin. That terrorist act had killed two U.S. servicemen and a Turkish woman, and injured scores of others

Shortly after the retaliatory strike, Washington produced an intercepted and decoded message sent by the Libyan Peoples Bureau in East Berlin. It said:

At 1:30 in the morning one of the acts was carried out with success, without leaving a trace behind.

Washington was willing to give up a sensitive intelligence method -- its ability to break the Libyan codes But once the rest of the world absorbed this, international grumbling subsided and many considered the retaliation against Tripoli justified.

Now for the consequences

Though the Defense Dept. under Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was intimately involved in the mistreatment of detainees, that same department under Robert Gates has correctly opted out of the torture business. It is now standing by time-honored U.S. military regulations and the Geneva Conventions. The FBI, from the outset of the war on terror in 2001, rejected the use of torture. Some FBI officers, troubled by what they were seeing, began keeping records of abuses by other agencies -- the so-called “war crimes files.”

The CIA, sadly, is now the sole U.S. government agency directed by the president to keep enhanced interrogation techniques on the table. It seems that while the U.S. military and the FBI have just said no, and the CIA, once again, has been left holding the bag.


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