Vermont Public Radio comment for Thursday December 11th,
2014
VPR 251 INTRO: The Senate Intelligence Committee
finally released its report this week on the CIA’s interrogation of suspected
terrorists, in the wake of 9/11. Today, commentator and veteran ABC News
foreign correspondent Barrie Dunsmore offers some thoughts on this highly
controversial investigation.
TEXT:
Just fifteen days after the terrorist attack of
September 11th, 2001, then Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on
Meet the Press. As he discussed the new terrorist threat with Tim Russert,
Cheney said: quote: “We have to work the dark side, if you will. Spend time in
the shadows of the intelligence work.” He added, “a lot of what needs to be
done will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.” Unquote
We have known for years that under prodding by Cheney
and his senior staff, the Department of Justice came up with a rationale and
definitions for what were euphemistically called, “enhanced interrogation
techniques.” We laymen, and most international human rights conventions, view these
techniques as torture.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has been looking
into those CIA “enhanced” methods for more than five years. It has analyzed
millions of internal CIA documents. Along the way, it has had to deal with significant
agency pushback, including CIA hacking of the committee’s computers.
In its declassified executive summary, the senate
panel concludes that the CIA had been brutal in its questioning of more than a
hundred terror suspects - while being less than truthful in its accounts of
this program to Congress and the White House.
Since the report came out, former CIA directors have
decried its findings. And Republican committee members, many of whom initially
approved of the investigation, have since refused to accept its conclusions on
grounds that this is now is a highly partisan document designed to discredit
the George W. Bush administration.
The most strenuously debated item in the report is
whether or not the brutality produced significant intelligence that made the
country safer. The CIA says it did - and claims Osama Bin Laden was found and
killed because of detainee information extracted under duress. The senate’s
panel deconstructs this claim and concludes Bin Laden was found because of
information obtained long before the interrogation program even began.
A notable exception to the Republican dismissal of the
report’s conclusions is Republican Senator John McCain, whose five years as an
often tortured prisoner during the Vietnam War, give him unique credibility on
this subject.
Speaking from the Senate floor Tuesday,, McCain said,
“I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce
more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer
intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe
it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say
if they believe it will stop their suffering.”
Perhaps then, this question of whether torture works
depends on whether one believes Dick Cheney or John McCain. For me that’s an
easy call.
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