Cheney's 'Torture Works' Argument Is A Red Herring

Washington Independent :

No matter how much former Vice President Dick Cheney insists that torturing prisoners in secret CIA prisons worked (and Spencer has already laid out the huge holes in that argument) -- he and his fellow Republicans who still stand by their "enhanced interrogation techniques" can never prove that using less abusive techniques would not have worked. And for the question of whether the Attorney General must investigate the interrogators who committed unlawful abuse or the senior officials who ordered or approved it, the intelligence produced is irrelevant.

Read the whole story: Washington Independent

Comments

[EnvironmentalMuse]

"Out with the old... In with the new"! Cheney needs to go take a nap!

[PhilipTaylor]

This week it became increasingly clear that the T0RTURE program did not produce “the desired results.” The report shows it was:

1. NOT PROFESSIONAL
2. Cobbled Together and a Haphazard Process
3. Poorly Trained with Poor Supervision
4. Does NOT prove that Torture Program uncovered any Useful Information
5. Under-Trained Staff Used Unauthorized Enhanced Techniques
6. Does NOT prove attacks were stopped and any lives were saved
7. Showed Non-Ab_usive techniques e1icited the most important information
8. Documentation found on their person when captured was M0ST VALUABLE INFO

“It was a haphazard process, cobbled together in the months following the terr0rist attacks on New York and Washington by an agency that had never been in the interr0gation business,” the AP report continued. “The result was a patchwork program in which rules kept shifting and the goals often were unclear.”

MSM FAILS AGAIN (including CNN, F0X, MSNBC): “You’d think that since the media reported so much on Chainy’s claims about the documents, they would also rush to report that Chainy was wrong. Not so,” writes Amanda Terke1 at Th!nkProgress.

[PhilipTaylor]

Last spring media trumpeted Chainy’s challenge to release C1A’s t0rture memos.

Chainy said the documents would vindicate the Bush administration’s t0rture program operated within the law, and provided indispensable information in protecting the US from further terr0rist attacks.

Monday the C1A released a significant part of those documents, a 2OO4 C1A inspector general’s report on t0rture practices that largely contradicted what Chainy said in pub1ic.

“The professionals involved in that program were very, very cautious, very careful — wouldn’t do anything without making certain it was authorized and that it was legal,” Chainy told ABC last December. “And any suggestion to the contrary is just wrong. Did it produce the desired results? I think it did.”

[lyleholstein]

http://pubrecord.org/torture/4070/describe-extraordinary-detail-process/

Another New Document: This One Describes in Extraordinary Detail Process of ‘Rendition,’ Torture

Among the treasure trove of documents released Monday related to the CIA’s detention and torture program is a 20-page background paper that for the first time describes in extraordinary detail the process of “rendition” and the torture prisoners are then subjected to when they are flown to “black site” prisons.

The background paper clearly illustrates that the torture of detainees was systematic and micromanaged by the top officials at the CIA, the Justice Department, medical professionals, and likely the White House. Previously, the CIA has refused to disclose any details of its rendition program citing state secrets.

[dadw5boys]

If the rumors are true about the locked trailors setting in the sun and mass graves we are in for some hard times in the court house.

[Tommygun264]

Whether or not it works, torture is AGAINST THE LAW, not to mention un-American and a tool or cowards.

[pjburke]

Babbling Brooks:

You state: "The data in the released memos shows rather clearly that it was effective in uncovering plots, identifying terrorist leaders, leading to their capture, and in saving lives of innocent civilians and soldiers as near as one can estimate effects of the mathematically unquantifi­able."

Rubbish. It clearly states the exact opposite..­. starting on Page 85, and continuing through Page 89.

You are making stuff up.

[sviolette]

It's called babbling.

[solarian]

chenney lets see if it works we will try it on you

[BabblingBrooks]

Not very imaginative. Several people have said this before you.

[sviolette]

I'll bet it's more like millions but who's counting?

[PuzzledinPeoria]

Oh, I don't know.

I feel tortured every time I read or hear the name Dick Cheney.

It's working on me!

[dadw5boys]

All Soldiers expect some torture that is war.

What Torture really does in send a signal to your own countrys citizens and make them fearful to challege that power structure !!!

READ : The Art Of War !!!

[BabblingBrooks]

Read it several times. Several translations. Good book for soldiers to read.

Also Gayle Rivers' "The War Against the Terrorist.­" "The Five Fingers" and other books by former counterterrorist who knows what he talks about.

"The Haunted Wood" https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol50no2/html_files/BK_Soviet_Espionage_8.htm Details Stalin-Era spying in the USA. Joe McCarthy was right!

[BabblingBrooks]

Uniformed soldiers captured by the US do not expect torture. US soldiers captured by terrorists and some other countries expect torture. We're the USA. We respect the laws.

[pjburke]

We -- U.S. forces, intelligence operatives, and contractors (mercenaries) -- violated the Convention on Torture and the Geneva Conventions (not to mention domestic criminal laws against torture and war crimes).

That is the ruling of the International Committee of the Red Cross -- which has sole legal authority to make that determination -- and had reported that very ruling, as such, to the President of the United States in 2007.

[dadw5boys]

All the men I served with expected it !!

[republicrat1]

good article.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/what_the_presidents_attack_on.html

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council.

[republicrat1]

President Bush made the same kind of decision that FDR had made 60 years earlier. Rather than just go after those who had launched the attack on our homeland, he undertook a Global War on Terrorism to defeat all of those states and groups that subscribed to the radical Islam ideology. Just like FDR, President Bush threw the switch from defense to offense. Whether he played offense well or poorly during his years in office is something that historians will debate for the next thousand years. But there's no doubt that after 9-11 the US was playing offense.

That's now over. Look hard at everything President Obama has said and done -- this week's attack on the CIA, his banishment of the phrase "Global War on Terrorism" and its replacement with the milquetoast "overseas contingency operations," his apologetic Cairo speech, his seeming indifference to the recent bombings in Iraq, his unwillingness to seize the opportunity of the students' uprising in Iran to knock over that dangerous regime, his trashing of our special relationship with Israel, and all the rest including his longtime personal relationships with vicious America-haters like Bill Ayers and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright -- and the conclusion is inescapable: President Obama is throwing the switch from offense back to defense, and returning the US to its September 10 mindset.

[4 Real]

Oh please, go sell your tripe on redstate where they'll actually believe you.

[BeasleysMom]

Your comparison of Bush to FDR turns my stomach. Bush wasn't fit to clean FDRs shoes.

[pjburke]

This cartoon-silly, wholly-deficient understanding of America history screams loudly that this writer is lightyears short of developing any capability for reasoned discussion on any serious issue... particularly anything depending upon a grasp of -- or even familiarity with the existence of -- actual facts.

Delusions, fantasies, factual errors, and plain misunderstandings have all had children, grandchildren, even children of unknowable parentage, lineage, or ancestry in this writer's mind. This poor, pathetic soul is more confused than a fly stuck in a snare drum... a fly on acid stuck in a snare drum, even.

FDR and Bush, "just like?"

The very suggestion is beyond pornograph­ic... beyond obscene... into unspeakable realms where the rational are fully protected from ever going, even by some horrible and hideous wrong-turn mistake, simply by virtue of their rationality.

Not this spinner of such baffling cartoon-history, however.

No... here we have a sort of foreign correspondent, reporting live from some kind of twisting, psychotic kaleidescope of fear and nonsense, myth and illusion, supposition, illogic and propaganda. I'm convinced that this foreign correspondent from Faux-reality pees his pants every time he is confronted with this fact: Barack Obama IS the Commander-­in-Chief..­. and Barack Obama IS the President of the United States.

They will never see the flies in their eyes, because of all of the flies in their eyes.

[republicrat1]

BREAKING: Rumors Surface That Leon Panetta is Resigning

Posted by Erick Erickson (Profile)

Wednesday, August 26th at 2:57PM EDT
14 Comments

I’m hearing a very credible rumor that Leon Panetta has dispatched a resignation letter to Barack Obama on vacation.

Panetta is said to be extremely angry about the possible prosecution of CIA officers doing their job and has decided to resign in protest.

The rumor is unconfirmed, but given the sourcing I think it is safe to treat it credibly.

[quiviran]

Zey ver only followink orders. Didn't work at Nuremberg, shouldn't work now.

[sviolette]

He should resign and the CIA should be disbanned.

[lthuedk 1]

It's like a defense brief. What he'd bring to court, as opposed to actually being a monster; a subverter of our country, an ideologue, and a torturer, murderer, and thief.

Cheney might have no choice but to be as absurd as he's always been-particularly after Fitzgerald interviewed he and Bush. Cheney must not make a single mistake. Everything he says could be used against him, I'm guessing.

He's also a symbol of the Republican Party; how far it overreached and how corrupt in letter and spirit it has become. It's far less than the sum of it's parts.

http://www.light-to-dark.com/dick_tater_with_joe_mole_and_tony_tool.html

[panamarine]

And he is: Hanging around the scene of the crime ...(Washin­gton D.C. area) ---so as to keep tabs on the investigation and to coyly suggest innocence - - He is employing the old HIDING IN PLAIN VIEW tactic -Doing a: Distract the hound dogs and hope the Hunter will go on a Wild goose Chase - Trying out the: A good Defense is a quick Offense. But, sooner or later..... ??????

[research]

If flaying people in public on a rack, with live TV got them to give us useful information, would the conservatives do it?

Yes, but just because they would enjoy it.

Would we torture children in front of parents?

Mothers in front of children?

The conservatives have Zero empathy, zero regard for human life, zero respect for bill of rights, the constitution and everything America really stands for.

Yet the Tools of the Conservatives claim they are Christian!

What fools.