There's just one problem with that argument, the CIA doesn't do the job of enforcing the law or catching terrorist, the armed forces and the FBI do that. So what, besides today's revelation that Abu Zubaydah gave up KSM without Torture does the FBI have to say?
FBI Director Mueller to Vanity Fair when asked if "Enhanced Interrogation" had foiled any plots?
I don’t believe that has been the case
Ruh Roh!
On the other hand regularly gumshoe police work by local law enforcement and the FBI DID succeed at protecting American citizens.
In an interview in London in April 2008, I remind F.B.I. director Robert Mueller of the attacks planned against targets on American soil since 9/11 that his agents have disrupted: for example, a plot to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and another to wreak mayhem at army recruiting centers and synagogues in and around Torrance, California. These and other homegrown conspiracies were foiled by regular police work. The F.B.I. learned of the Fort Dix plot from a Circuit City store where a technician raised the alarm when asked to copy firearms-training videos, while the Torrance cell was rounded up when cops probed the backgrounds of two of its members after they allegedly robbed a local gas station.
No waterborading, no wide-net of electronic surveillance, just a reasonable TIP and good follow up.
Like the tip by one Pheonix FBI Agent in 2001 that I've got some guys where who want to fly planes, but don't much care about landing them.
Time and time again we hear "The Tactics were Necessary" or "There was no other way", but clearly there IS another way. A way that works.
Furthermore, what seems more and more apparent from the various sources which are now coming forward in conjuction with the Levin Senate Armed Services Report is that torture under the Bush Administration wasn't used to provide information to save Amercians, it was used to proved information to save Bush's Foreign Policy, and justify the Iraq War
Several of those I interviewed point out the dearth of specific claims the administration has proffered. “The proponents of torture say, ‘Look at the body of information that has been obtained by these methods.’ But if K.S.M. and Abu Zubaydah did give up stuff, we would have heard the details,” says Cloonan. “What we got was pabulum.” A former C.I.A. officer adds: “Why can’t they say what the good stuff from Abu Zubaydah or K.S.M. is? It’s not as if this is sensitive material from a secret, vulnerable source. You’re not blowing your source but validating your program. They say they can’t do this, even though five or six years have passed, because it’s a ‘continuing operation.’ But has it really taken so long to check it all out?”
Officials who analyzed Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation reports say that the reports were afforded the highest value within the Bush administration not because of the many American lives they were going to save but because they could be cited repeatedly against those who doubted the wisdom of ousting Saddam by force.
“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.”
Oh, I think the did know. Particularly since Zubaydah and KSM weren't the only ones this technique was used against.
Ibn Shayk Al-Libi, an associate of Zubaydah who was captured and tortured in Egypt, was the primary source of information that Iraq had provided chemical weapons training to Al Qeada. Guess what, this information was false
Just like the information that Iraq possessed "Mobile Weapons Labs" come from a former Iraqi who had relocated to Germany named Rafid Alwan, aka Curveball. (See this Report from BBC Newsnight) who was also, like, al-Libi, Lying.
The information provided by Curveball and al-Libi together led us into unneccesary and tragic War with an Unarmed Nation. And many others were coercively mistreated and suffered in The Black Sites, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram AFB in order to help bolster their false claims.
Tortured to provide Lies to justify other lies. We have to come to grips with the fact that the U.S. deliberately waged a Campaign of Terror across the middle-east all based on LIES!
What needs to be asked now is not just what information we received through "enhanced interrogation" but also - how much of that information was BULLSHIT and led us down rat-holes and on wild-goose chases like the "Liberty City Six".
It really doesn't matter if any of these claims were ever true, because if so it probably wasn't neccessary to go these lengths, most likely the reason they were "resistant" is because the questions being asked were bogus, and by using these methods all we've done is get more bad information. Bad information that cost far more lives than any of the "good" information (assuming there somehow is any that the FBI director doesn't know about) may have saved.
Garbage In, garbage out.
Vyan
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