Pat Lang is a retired intelligence officer and Green Beret who seems to be a "running buddy" of Larry Johnson's. His blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis, is generally outspoken, incisive and he writes without pulling punches...as far as I can see - having never been an intelligence agent myself.
His latest entry addresses torture and our mad VP. I have posted this as a diary rather than on the open thread because it contains some of the best "talking points" that I have seen to date regarding why we should NOT be using torture for intelligence purposes. More below the flip:
Here are some excerpts:
People often ask me at public events if I think it is "all right" to torture prisoners if that is necessary in order to obtain information needed to prosecute the "Global War on Terror." (GWOT)
I routinely tell them that it is NOT "all right" to torture people for any reason. The assembly expects that result from the question and they also expect that I will then give them the standard lecture which holds (correctly) that the tortured will tell you anything that they think you want to hear in order to get you to stop what you are doing. Therefore, information obtained through torture is logically suspect and worthless. Intelligence interrogators are supposed to be skilled at their trade. Their trade is about applied psychology, not about beating confessions out of people.
snip snip snip
The danger is that Cheney and all the other political obsessives on this subject in and out of government encourage those among who are quite capable of any bestiality that their furtive imaginations contrive. They hold out to the "dark ones" the possibility of accomplishing their dreams of power and domination. There are such people in any society, among any people, anywhere, and at any time. By creating a climate of permissiveness toward abuse of prisoners "for interrogation" the Cheney/Rumsfeld crowd have enabled a release of the demonic forces that, to some extent, lurk in all of us.
I recommend the article. Sic Semper Tyrannis