Be Careful What You Wish For

by digby

Those who are following this very closely already know this, but since the lines being drawn among the villagers seem to be being drawn around whether the illegal, immoral torture regime was effective, perhaps this should be emphasized more strongly:

The CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to recently declassified Justice Department memos.

That undercuts assertions by former vice president Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials that the use of harsh interrogation tactics including waterboarding, which is widely considered torture, was justified because it headed off terrorist attacks.

The risks and effectiveness of waterboarding and other enhanced techniques are at the center of an increasingly heated debate over how thoroughly to investigate the CIA's secret detention and interrogation programs.

"It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program," Steven G. Bradbury, then the Justice Department's principal deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in a May 30, 2005, memo to CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, one of four released last week by the Obama administration.

"As the IG Report notes, it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks. And because the CIA has used enhanced techniques sparingly, 'there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness'," Bradbury wrote, quoting the IG report.

Nevertheless, Bradbury concluded in his May 2005 memos that the program had been effective; that conclusion relied largely on memos written after the still secret report by Inspector General John Helgerson.

Helgerson also concluded that waterboarding was riskier than officials claimed and reported that the CIA's Office of Medical Services thought that the risk to the health of some prisoners outweighed any potential intelligence benefit, according to the memos.

The IG's report is among several indications that the Bush administration's use of abusive interrogation methods was less productive than some former administration officials have claimed.


It's right there in the memos if members of the media would care to read them. Why that should be ignored in favor of some specific memo Dick Cheney clings to as proof of the efficacy of torture is beyond me. From what we can tell in the Bradbury memos,despite his efforts to distort the conclusion, the CIA itself could not find these tactics to be obviously useful and they had every reason to try to do so. After all, this is torture we're talking about, and all the memo writing and IG reports indicate those involved were very well aware of the shocking nature of these tactics. If they could have found these things to be unambiguously useful they would have done so.

I'm not sure why everyone in the media is ignoring this unless they still think of Cheney as their daddy and just can't wrap their minds around the fact that the man is actually a psychopath. I'm sure that's tough to deal with.

The ACLU got a very heavily redacted copy of that IG report sometime back which showed absolutely nothing of value. But it may still come out:

Jameel Jaffer, the director of the ACLU's National Security Project, called the report a "crucial document" and said its declassification is the subject of a court case before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"We hope that we'll be able to negotiate a less redacted version of that report," Jaffer said, adding that the release of the Justice Department memos has increased pressure for more revelations.

"It's a crucial document," he said. "It will shed light on what kind of measures the CIA was using before August 2002" and whether they exceeded limits imposed by the Justice Department lawyers.

Two of the memos declassified last week _ a May 10, 2005, assessment of individual enhanced techniques and a May 30, 2005, assessment of U.S. obaligations under an international anti-roture agreement, cite the IG report at least 34 times, often quoting it verbatim. Those citations provide the first glimpse of the spy agency's inspector general's analysis of the interrogation program.


One of the unintended consequences of Cheney's requests for more documents to prove his case (and his allies' hysterical accusations of partisanship and reckless assertions of the necessity of torture) is that they may end up forcing the Obama administration to release more damning information. The fact that so many conservatives and their toadies take on faith that torture must have worked says more about their personal psychologies than anything else. That they don't care that torture is immoral and illegal says something much darker and disturbing than that.

(Certainly none of them should ever be allowed anywhere near nuclear weapons again. They have shown they have no limits.)