Bush Team Takes a Victory Lap on the "Success" of Torture

It is really sickening to see all the major figures in the Bush administration come crawling out of the woodwork to "take credit" for the killing of Osama bin Laden by the military under Obama's direction. This from the team whose titular head, Bush, claimed that he no longer had any interest in OBL.

But this scurrilous crew now claim that "enhanced interrogation" (aka TORTURE) was the key that allowed the victory of getting OBL. Funny. Barry Ritholz has a very long list of real experts who publicly state that torture is absolutely useless in getting meaningful material in an interrogation:

Virtually all of the top interrogation experts – both conservatives and liberals (except for those trying to escape war crimes prosecution) – say that torture doesn’t work:

• Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1 says:

“Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

• The C.I.A.’s 1963 interrogation manual stated:

Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex ‘admissions’ that take still longer to disprove.

• According to the Washington Post, the CIA’s top spy – Michael Sulick, head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service – said that the spy agency has seen no fall-off in intelligence since waterboarding was banned by the Obama administration. “I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint.”

• The CIA’s own Inspector General wrote that waterboarding was not “efficacious” in producing information.

• A 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks (Milton Bearden) says (as quoted by senior CIA agent and Presidential briefer Ray McGovern):

It is irresponsible for any administration not to tell a credible story that would convince critics at home and abroad that this torture has served some useful purpose.

This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work — it doesn’t — but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.

The above is just a very small snippet of the public statements. Go read the original post by Ritholtz to see just how universal the agreement among real experts is that torture is of no benefit.

Talk about zombies. The Bush "team" with its bad ideas, bad leadership, economic failures, military failures, etc. just can't be killed. Here they are back in force trying to pull the same stunt and convince people that OBL was "gotten by Bush" and not by that socialist Kenyan pretender Obama. Incredible. These people not only torture, they are torturing me by refusing to get off the stage of history after their time is up. They continue to want to distort truth and bend the world to their warped views.