CIA AGENT ADMITS AGENCY TORTURED PRISONERS WITH WHITE HOUSE APPROVAL
GUARDIAN, UK - The waterboarding of a senior al-Qaida figure was approved at the top levels of the US government, a former CIA agent said. John Kiriakou, the leader of the team who captured Abu Zubaydah, did not explain how he knew who approved the interrogation technique but a "well-laid out, well-thought out reason" had to be set out to officials in each case.
"This isn't something done willy nilly. This isn't something where an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he's going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner," he told NBC.
"This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the national security council and justice department."
Kiriakou said he did not know the interrogation of Zubaydah had been recorded by the CIA or that the tapes were subsequently destroyed. "Like a lot of Americans, I'm involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that waterboarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the waterboarding technique. And I struggle with it," he said.
"What happens if we don't waterboard a person and we don't get that nugget of information and there's an attack. I would have trouble forgiving myself. ... At the time, I felt that waterboarding was something that we needed to do."
PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - Let's for the sake of argument, leave the moral issue aside. The non-moral argument made by Kiriakou was that torture worked. But it didn't. In fact, the Bush regime's use of torture and other abusive treatment of prisoners has made matters much, much worse. We are in the midst of the most disastrous military enterprise since Vietnam in part because we have made it clear to Muslims around the world - with the help of torture, among other things - that we consider them sub-human. This is precisely what happened with the Nazis as well. You don't have even raise the moral arguments. Their concentration camps, in the end, didn't work. They lost. What Kiriakou did was not only wrong, it was futile and stupid.
3 Comments:
States that use inhumane methods do not always lose. In fact, there are many countries around the world that have, and continue, to use torture or inhumane treatment against their own people and to get away with it. That's not an argument in favour of inhumane treatment, it's just a fact. It's also a fact that if we let our government do this, it will end up doing worse . . . to us.
Kiriakou is still doing the agency's bidding on this.
Sounds to me like a spin job.
It's a nasty thing, but...
I call bull shit on this one.
"What happens if we don't waterboard a person and we don't get that nugget of information and there's an attack. I would have trouble forgiving myself. ... At the time, I felt that waterboarding was something that we needed to do."
The mere act of torture exponentially increases the likelihood that there will be another attack in retaliation of such injustice. Israel has been making this mistake for decades now. Desperate, deteriorating empires have historically resorted to such unjustifiable atrocities in the wake of impending collapse.
Let's apply the same logic to child rearing, since most of our politicians and media shamefully discuss Islam and Muslim nations in a similar condescending way...
"What happens if we don't torture children when they smoke their first cigarette, and we don't get the message across that cigarette smoking is bad for one's health. I would have trouble forgiving myself, knowing a child was on the way to getting lung cancer. ... At the time, I felt that torturing children was something that we needed to do."
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