The recent release of the Bybee memos outlining Bush-era justification for the use of harsh interrogation techniques raises the issue of legal consequences for former White House officials, not to mention the effectiveness of torture as a method of intelligence gathering.
U.S. President Barack Obama last week said the White House would not pursue legal claims against officials involved in the justification or the practice of so-called torturous techniques — isolation, humiliation, waterboarding — used to illicit “confessor” behavior in detainees.
While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle offered praise to the forward-looking release of the Bybee memos, former CIA Director Michael Hayden lashed out at Obama, telling The Associated Press the release of the memos gives terrorists the information needed to prepare for such interrogation techniques, adding it shows Washington “can’t keep anything secret.”
Meanwhile, Mark Thiessen, a speechwriter (!?) for U.S. President Bush, has come forward in The Washington Post and elsewhere giving tacit approval for such harsh interrogations techniques, saying they led to countless confessions of alleged plots against the United States.
He goes on to use fear mongering — as President Bush had in his campaign for a second term — to justify the continued use of torture.
“President Obama’s decision to release these documents is one of the most dangerous and irresponsible acts ever by an American president during a time of war — and Americans may die as a result,” he writes.
Please.
This is in stark contrast to CIA officers and academics alike who state extreme interrogation techniques are not useful in gleaning factual information from detainees.
“Where physical violence was inflicted during the course of such an attempt (at gathering information), the attempt was particularly likely to fail completely,” writes Albert Biderman in his seminal article, Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War.
In a more recent account, storied CIA officer Robert Baer writes in a recent edition of Time magazine that the intelligence community does not view so-called torture as a valid interrogation technique.
“The wisdom inside the CIA has always been that the best intelligence is obtained through persuasion rather than coercion,” he writes.
With Obama reversing course, suggesting a truth panel similar to the 9/11 Commission convene to examine these techniques, one thing is assured, if Khalid Sheik Mohammed — the self-confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and recipient of over 180 waterboardings — is not a stark raving terrorist lunatic, he certainly is one now.
That is not American justice.
“The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers”
– Carl Gustav Jung
