The Senate’s torture study

The debate over the CIA’s torture of suspected terrorists in the wake of 9/11 was reignited last week after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify key parts of a report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. The review concludes that the program, ended by President Obama in 2009, yielded little useful intelligence, and details previously undisclosed cases of abuse, including that of a prisoner who was repeatedly dunked in a tank of ice water and then beaten with truncheons. Such interrogations are “a stain on our history that must never be allowed to happen again,” said the committee’s chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The CIA, which has called the report misleading, will vet the document for sensitive national security disclosures before its release.

The CIA lied to the nation, said The Baltimore Sun in an editorial. Agency officials repeatedly claimed that its violent interrogations kept the nation safe, but “Senate investigators couldn’t find a single instance in which information gained through torture led to the capture or killing” of a top terrorist. In fact, the only useful information the CIA did extract from suspects “was obtained by more traditional means before they were ever tortured.”

I ran the CIA’s interrogation program, said Jose Rodriguez Jr. in The Washington Post,and I know it was effective. I saw how tough questioning of top al Qaida militants like Abu Zubaida “provided critical information” that allowed us to find Osama bin Laden and disrupt plots. Those who suggest we should have questioned Zubaida “more gently have never felt the burden of protecting innocent lives.”

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The report will show that Zubaida gave up almost all of his critical information under normal interrogation, and then was ruthlessly waterboarded, said Paul Waldman in Prospect.org. No wonder Rodriguez, Dick Cheney, and other Bush administration officials must deny this, because if torture didn’t work, “what are they? They’re monsters.” They crossed a bright moral line, and wrecked America’s reputation, all for nothing. “And no one wants to believe that about themselves.”