Tactics

I'll say right at the start of this post, that I have a bias about torture. I think it's disgusting, immoral, and destructive to the human community in both the short and long term. Frankly the "ticking time bomb" theory that apologists like Mark Bowden and Alan Dershowitz use, is the sloppiest bit of logic imaginable. It would be more honest for these hacks to ask "Would you be willing to be savagely tortured as an innocent caught up in a hunt for intelligence on terrorism?" That is after all the track record of interrogative torture in recent history--as Amnesty International so eloquently relates.

This brings me to this morning's "talk" on NPR between Linda Wertheimer, John Hendren and David Greene. In discussing Bush's recent admissions on the CIA secret prisons and the "harsh tactics" (the Bushspeak term for "torture") used there, Greene and Wertheimer give credence to Bush's claims of how successful the torture has been. Wertheimer says of Bush, "he talked about how much the country has learned from these people and how valuable it has been. He said that some of the things they’ve learned from these prisoners actually stopped future attacks." To this Greene responds, "That's exactly right." Greene goes on to restate Bush's speech: "a lot of these very harsh tactics produced results, and the crux of his message was that this kind of interrogation is effective – he said that these tactics produced vital information and acually broke up some terror attacks and saved innocent lives."

These journalists offer no challenge to these claims, which is inexcusable, especially since rebutting Bush's lies is not terribly difficult as Leigh Pomeroy of Minnesota Monitor shows.