I know you already know that Cheney is mouthing off about releasing documents that show that torture “worked” (never mind that doesn’t excuse it from being illegal and immoral). A typical Cheney thing to do – he can always demand that more documents be released which, according to him, would show that torture saved American lives, because there’s no way that all documents can be released, due to national security concerns. So he can always say it’s the ones that haven’t been released that prove his point.
But, apparently, there are specific documents at this moment that he’s calling for.
In particular he requests two CIA reports: a 12-page report dated July 13, 2004, and a 19-page report dated June 1, 2005.[...]
The point here is that by 2004-05, the Administration's self-justification for its torture policy was well underway. These reports are not contemporaneous accounts of what intelligence the torture yielded. Rather, the CIA and Cheney were papering the file well after the fact.
I know some of you will say it doesn't matter whether torture worked or not. This is true, as far as it goes. But there's a large body of evidence not only that torture doesn't work generally, but that that it didn't work specifically when implemented by the U.S. (or didn't work any better than non-criminal methods would have worked). So while I've seen a lot of well-reasoned arguments about why the debate shouldn't be framed as did the torture work or not, I would say that is merely one part of a wide-ranging debate, and there's no reason to concede that point to Cheney's mendacity.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated. There may be some delay before your comment is published. It all depends on how much time M has in the day. But please comment!