March Torture Articles

Here are some articles from last month I finally got around to reading on the Bush administration torture policy.

In US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites, Mark Danner reviews the International Committee of the Red Cross' Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody. The review is really long, so I read Brian Tamanaha''s summary, No More Debate About Whether We Tortured.

"This article by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books ends the debate over whether we tortured. Danner's article is based upon a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which interviewed prisoners. The report explicitly concludes that we "tortured" a number of prisoners. But don't take the ICRC's word for it. Read the extensive accounts by the prisoners of their treatment and decide for yourself (although they were kept in isolation, their accounts substantially coincide).

On Sunday, the Washington Post wrote, Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots. Bush described Zubaida as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations" but he wasn't even an official member of al-Qaeda.

"When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him. The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said."

digby commented on the article. "Dick Cheney is going to hell. But we knew that. And so are Bush and Rice and all the rest who insisted on torturing Abu Zubaida, a brain damaged man who was so desperate that he made up fantastical terrorist plots just to make the torture stop. They not only committed a war crime, they made us all less safe by sending investigators all over the world on wild goose chases."

Dan Froomkin comments on it too, in Bush's Torture Rationale Debunked. "Zubaida wasn't a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn't holding back critical information. His torture didn't produce valuable intelligence -- and it certainly didn't save lives."

"All the calculations the Bush White House claims to have made in its decision to abandon long-held moral and legal strictures against abusive interrogation turn out to have been profoundly flawed, not just on a moral basis but on a coldly practical one as well."