Fourthbranch’s Lawyer-Speak

by dday

As soon as you begin to have an argument over torture’s effectiveness, the argument is immediately lost. But it’s worth noting that Dick Cheney, the Great Dissembler, claimed for months that documents would show the how torture worked in saving lives, and yet, while those documents were released along with the IG report, none of the information contained in them prove Cheney’s hypothesis. Jane Mayer sez:

OLBERMANN: What about Mr. Cheney’s assessment that there would be documents that prove that torture worked where traditional and legal interrogation did not or would not. Is there anything in those documents that were released today that supports that contention?

MAYER: Well, the documents that I’ve seen, and maybe I’m missing something, but so far, I am amazed at how little support there is for the things that Vice President Cheney has been saying. There is nothing but a mass of claims that they got information from this individual and that individual, many from KSM, who apparently has been the greatest fount of information for them, but there’s absolutely nothing saying that they had to beat them to get this information. In fact, as anybody knows who knows anything about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he was dying to tell the world, when he was interviewed by Al Jazeera before he was in US custody, about everything he knew and everything he did. He was proud of his role as the mastermind of 9/11. He loves to talk about it. So there’s no evidence that I see in this that these things were necessary. I spoke to someone at the CIA who was an advisor to them who conceded to me that “We could have gotten the same information from tea and crumpets.”

OLBERMANN: Or buying a copy of the Al Jazeera interview.

The Cheney documents were deliberately created at the time to rebut both this CIA Inspector General report recommending prosecutions, and the heat put on by Congress about allegations of torture. They were actually conceived to deceive people into believing that torture works, an irrelevant point at best. And yet these same memos do not support Cheney’s claims. They say that certain individuals gave up information, but only after questioned through traditional means, which was happening contemporaneously to the torture. It is impossible to say definitively, therefore, which information came as a result of what techniques.

And yet, not only has traditional media largely ignored the fact that the documents do not support Cheney’s claims (which were given tons of media attention previously), but an extremely carefully worded statement by Cheney, stating that “The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda” – which says nothing of WHAT techniques caused this intelligence to be gleaned – has been taken completely at face value by reporters, in particular CNN, which ran Cheney’s comments as facts:

Cheney says documents show interrogations prevented attacks

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says documents released Monday support his view that harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects prevented attacks and yielded crucial information about al Qaeda.

A simple read of the documents shows this to be completely untrue. Jane Mayer, as expert a journalist on this subject as anyone, calls them unsupportable. But too many reporters just write down these things and run with them, the facts be damned. It’s part of this pattern of the traditional media waking up every day with a blank slate, without even bothering to consult the full timeline of the issue.

We already know they tortured. We know that DOJ bureaucrats illegally approved the torture on Dick Cheney’s request and we know that a bunch of unprofessional, untrained interrogators complied and then went beyond even what was approved. We know that innocent people were tortured and we know that prisoners were killed. We’ve known all this for a long time. The question is not what happened, it’s whether anyone will be held accountable for it.

On that point, here’s Jane Mayer talking about the Durham investigation, actually hopeful about what it may find:

MAYER: Well, my guess is that if they actually open some kind of serious investigation, and Durham is said to be a very serious prosecutor, that even if they start at the very bottom, it’s going to keep leading up and up through the chain of command. Because, if nothing else, if they actually bring charges against anybody at the CIA who was at the bottom of the food chain, the first thing that person’s going to do is say “I was authorized, let me tell you what my orders were.” So they’ve begun a process that could lead to the top.

OLBERMANN: Well, if it works along the Archibald Cox lines, as I analogized last week, where they’ve supposedly circumscribed it, but people want to get out from the scapegoat for the whole operation, then I think your assessment is correct.

We know that none of the torture here happened by happenstance, but through a directed policy emanating from the top. Instead of prosecuting “bad apples” who were young MPs on the night shift in Baghdad, we’re talking about mid-level career CIA. They aren’t dupes, and they know how to shift the attention up the chain of command. I don’t think these interrogators will live with being the scapegoats. It may take some time, but we really could see some legitimate accountability here. And I hope so – because otherwise this will remain a black mark that can never wash out.

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