What We Know About Who the CIA Tortured, How, and What Good It Did

Nothing new, really.

What We Know About Who the CIA Tortured, How, and What Good It Did

I couldn't read the whole thing; it makes me sick to my stomach.

The fact that nobody from the Cheney Administration has gone to jail is also sickening.

This isn't the country I signed up for.

OF COURSE the torture yielded nothing, it never does, anybody with any knowledge of history knows that.  Again, it's sickening that Cheney & his stooges apparently knew so little about the world.

I'm starting to think, with press this report is getting, and the press that Edward Snowden has gotten, that reforming the security agencies may be an issue in the mid-term elections in November.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/03/4037714/mcclatchy-senate-panel-finds-cia.html

One of the things I read (elsewhere) is that the whole discussion about whether people can hold out under torture, the "ticking bomb" scenario, etc etc is all completely irrelevant to the CIA. They never ask any questions under torture that they don't already know the answer to. The purpose of the process isn't to discover information directly. It is to break the mind of the subject, so that subsequent questioning (if it ever happens) might be more productive. Hopefully, they only drive insane (or kill) guilty people. But of course, there are no guarantees of that.

I apologise if that makes you vomit. If it doesn't, you might want to ask yourself, why not?

The long history of torture has taught one thing to those willing to listen, and that is the torturee will say anything to get the torture to stop. Sometimes the information is valid, if the victim really knows something. More often the confession is completely bogus, since the victim knows nothing.

In the field it's impossible to tell which is which.

And if you did know, torture wouldn't be necessary.

You're exactly right, NoCo, that torture has a long and not-so-illustrious history in the American intelligence and military communities.
You're also right that under torture, a man will tell you what you want to hear.

When I was in Viet Nam, we spent years searching for an imaginary large North Viet Nam communications installation in the south. It was no problem to get a captured member of the Viet Cong, or a VCS (Viet Cong Suspect) to give us quite specific information about this installation - something that never existed.

There is no reason to expect that today's CIA and military are any more successful at gathering accurate information using these same tactics.

No reason at all.  In fact the Cheney Administration reached way back to the 1950s to resurrect some Cold War military tactics -- like using psychics and "remote sensors" in their search for WMD and UBL and Saddam -- which had proven completely worthless fifty years earlier.  No reason to expect them to have learned anything in the interim.