The Senate report is out: The CIA reportedly lied to President Bush about how it was using “enhanced interrogation techniques” against suspected terrorists.
And to no one’s surprise — certainly not mine — former CIA director Michael Hayden has fired back. He’s defending his agency’s handling of the interrogation techniques.
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/cia-torture-report-113420.html?hp=c1_3
My tendency is to believe the Senate, that the CIA was less than truthful. After all, the CIA is a spy agency and its agents are, shall we say, trained to mislead.
The threshold question that will need to answered and then examined for its veracity is whether these techniques — which some call “torture” — produced actionable intelligence that helped the good guys fight the bad guys.
It’s becoming something of a liar’s contest. The CIA and the Bush administration say they did; others say the techniques didn’t provide any information that more normal techniques could have obtained.
The key element is whether torturing the al-Qaeda suspects helped our spooks find Osama bin Laden and whether that information led to the May 2011 SEAL team raid that killed the world’s most wanted terrorist.
The debate has been joined.
Meanwhile, U.S. embassies around the world have been put on heightened alert in case terrorists become so angry at the report that they strike at Americans abroad.
I am one American who does not want to see our forces torture captive combatants. We keep saying we’re above that kind of thing, that we don’t want to reduce our standards to the level of the terrorists we are trying to destroy.
I’m fine with that.
Our intelligence agencies are packed with well-trained professional interrogators who are fully capable of obtaining information through serious questioning and, yes, perhaps some threatening techniques. To inflict actual pain and suffering on those suspects, though, is no better than what they do to captives under their control.
Exceptional nations are able to employ exceptional tactics — even in wartime.