Outcomes of Torture

From: Dr. James Zogby, "Bush's Tortured Legacy," truthout, 7 April 2009

Two major stories, prominently featured in The Washington Post and The New York Times last Sunday, dealt with the Bush administration's use of torture. When combined, they raised several important issues.

The front-page banner headline in The Washington Post read "Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots," with the subhead continuing "Waterboarding, Rough Treatment of Abu Zubaidah Produced False Leads, Officials Say."...While, early on, President Bush heralded the capture of Abu Zubaidah (calling him "a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden"), the story notes how, within weeks of his imprisonment, analysts concluded that he was not an official member of al-Qaeda, serving more as a "travel agent" for recruits seeking to join the war in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, the Post reports that, facing intense pressure from the White House, interrogators were pushed to use torture techniques in an effort to extract information from their prisoner. In the end, they found that the "fruit" of this torture was either

information they already had or was misleading or useless. In the end, they concluded that the practice of torture was, at best, counterproductive.

Despite this conclusion by Abu Zubaidah's interrogators, the Post story quotes former Vice President Cheney, who continues to assert that "I've seen a report that was written, based upon the intelligence that we collected then, that itemizes the specific attacks that were stopped by virtue of what we learned through those programs."

Cheney, however, refuses to provide any evidence to make his case...

As The New York Times reports, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon has lodged a criminal complaint and begun an investigation of six former Bush administration officials (David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Douglas Feith and William Haynes II), charging them with possible violations of international law and the 1984 Geneva Convention against torture. Garzon is the same judge who issued an arrest order served in Britain against former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet for crimes committed during his bloody tenure....

What is interesting in all of this is the fact that with Cheney publicly acknowledging that "enhanced interrogation techniques" (i.e. torture) were used, the Spanish court should have an easy time making its case.  Full article