Lord Cheney of Darkside (Fourthbranch! to his friends) begins our story with this pronouncement on FOXnews (no, I’m not linking to them; trust me or find it your-own-self):
“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”
Ah, yes. The old “totally secret documents that will never, ever come out absolutely absolve me of authorizing, née positively cheerleading in favor of torture, whether it works or not. I mean, if torturing people also happens to generate some useful, actionable intelligence, it’s a win/win. But if it doesn’t, well, we’ll still torture ‘em. Right? I mean, who in the room can’t enjoy, er, I mean ’approve with my heart full of sadness’ some of that there torture stuff?”
And, hey, what do you know? The government actually went ahead and released said documents. A bit on the [redacted] side, but the essence seems to be there. For instance, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (aka KSM) was waterboarded over 180 times within the span of a month. What did we get out of that:
In response to questions about [al-Qaeda’s] efforts to acquire [weapons of mass destruction], [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] revealed that he had met three individuals involved in [al-Qaeda’s] program to produce anthrax. He appears to have calculated, incorrectly, that we had this information already, given that one of the three — Yazid Sufaat — had been in foreign custody for several months.
Of course, it seems he gave that stuff up pretty easily. Somewhere into the torture phase he, surprise surprise, just started making shit up to get the torture to stop:
“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA concerning the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me,” Mohammed said of his interrogator. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’ “
Unsurprisingly, the documents make the case that good-old, traditional “policework” style investigations gave us the most voluminous and best information:
For example, lists of names found on the computer [REDACTED] — a key [al-Qaeda] financial operative and facilitator for the 11 September attacks — seized in March 2003 represented [al-Qaeda] members who were to receive funds. Debriefers questioned detainees extensively on the names to determine who they were and how important they were to the organization. The information [REDACTED] helped us to better understand al-Qa’ida’s hierarchy, revenues, and expenditures, [REDACTED] as well as funds that were available to families.
What an astonishing outcome! Patrick Appel says it quite well:
“The documents are heavily redacted, but nothing we can read refers to torture techniques providing solid information…. It’s worth repeating that no one denies torture produces information. It produces loads of information, most of it bad. The same or better information can be collected through other techniques and, again, nothing in these documents compares and contrasts these methods.”
Tie all of this in with the GOP’s steadfast resistance to any investigation of said torture policies. Why, here’s favored mouthpiece Joe Lieberman doing the dirty-work of laying out the “we were only following orders!” fig-leaf:
These public servants must of course live within the law but they must also be free to do their dangerous and critical jobs without worrying that years from now a future Attorney General will authorize a criminal investigation of them for [their] behavior
My stars, what sort of country would it be if our public servants had to come to work each and every day with the nuisance of THE LAW hanging over their heads. We can’t have some sort of empirical reality getting in the way of whatever policy decisions we might need people to carry out. Next thing you know, they might start wanting to hold the President to the various laws of the land. Then just think of the mess we’d be in. It’s a slippery slope, I tells ya.
As Peggy Noonan so sagely advised us, re: G.W. Bush administration policy, enforcement of the law, and investigations of law-breaking activities:
“Sometimes in life you want to just keep walking… Sometimes, I think, just keep walking…. Some of life just has to be mysterious.”
Lemkin 