Richard Baer Talks to Bill Maher About Torture on Real Time

Photo by Salim Virji | pursuant to CC license

by Damozel | Bob Baer, Time's intelligence columnist,  is a former Mideast CIA field officer who wrote this: "The CIA's Dumb Intelligence."  Check out his enthralling interview with Bill Maher after the jump.

From Baer's April 23 column:

When the CIA was asked to resume hostile interrogations after Sept. 11, some agency leaders were dead set against it, arguing that the military was better equipped for the task. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted the job belonged to the CIA. We now know that Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. His interrogator, a former CIA colleague of mine, admits he had almost no training in the technique and knew nothing about how the cumulative effect of waterboarding might affect the quality of the information he was trying to extract....

The crucial point, though, is that even the communists suspected that torture can't be relied on to produce more than false confessions--because people will say anything to make the pain stop. This is the history that Bush officials chose to ignore. I asked a former CIA officer privy to the decision-making that led to the waterboarding of al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah whether he thought the abusive tactics worked. His answer: to a degree. From the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, Mohammed and other al-Qaeda prisoners, the CIA learned a lot more than it knew before about the group's communications, its use of safe houses and codes, and the outlines of its worldview. Valuable stuff, but stuff that could have been extracted through patient and relentless persuasion....

The use of torture has come at huge costs to American credibility and the morale and psychology of our intelligence agencies. If we're going to pay those costs, we ought to know what we're getting. A thorough clearing of the air will help discredit the idea that we either torture terrorists or become victims.

This false choice is played out on shows like 24, leaving people with the notion that had the FBI somehow caught one of the hijackers in the hours leading up to Sept. 11, torture would have led to the arrests of the 18 others before those planes took off. The truth is less sensational and more unsettling--but ultimately one that Americans should learn to accept. There are ticking time bombs out there. But torture won't get us any closer to discovering when they're going to go off.  (TIME; emphasis added)

John Amato (via): "It's very annoying that we still have to bring people out to explain over and over again that waterboarding is torture and "torture is bad."

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