Calling Your Bluff, Joe. Put Up or Shut Up.

The theme gets wider and deeper by the day. Cheney, Bush, Duncan Hunter, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, William McGurn and a multitude of others all say torture works. They hint, or say directly, that Barack Obama would be foolish to give it up. They declare this would put America at risk of another 9/11. They say arguments to the contrary are "leftwing rubbish." Message: Not only should those who ordered and implemented torture not be prosecuted, they also deserve medals. Anybody who would deny U.S. intelligence agencies the torture tool undermines America and enables the mass murder of Americans.

Joe Scarborough has joined the growing throng. Here he is in his six-minute defense of torture:

SCARBOROUGH: Yes I do. Yes I do. And I know for a fact that waterboarding brought our interrogators, brought Americans, probably about 70-75 percent of what they get. What they got from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed opened doors that we are still going through. Waterboarding has produced and given so much evidence to our people in the CIA and in the other intelligence agencies. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed by himself has done more to crush al Qaeda than Dick Cheney or George Bush because of waterboarding. ...

Really, Joe? Just how high is your security clearance? Who's your source? How about giving us a single example of actionable intelligence gained from torture that has saved a single American life? Just one.

I'm not asking because I think there are no examples in which torture has succeeded. I'm calling your bluff because I'm 99% convinced that you, with your cachet as a former Congressman and record of making unsupported statements, are pulling that 70%-75% out of your behind. It sure sounds good. It sure backs up the frame you and your fellow torture-lovers have adopted. But it's BS. And spreading BS makes you a disinformant. Which makes you a liar. It's easy enough for you to prove me wrong.

Ali Frick at Think Progress wrote:

Scarborough condescendingly asked Freeland, "Should we just bring them a birthday cake and ask them what soccer match they’d like to see?" In fact, the interrogator who successfully brought down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — and who has written and spoken publicly about how torture doesn’t work — told Laura Ingraham last month he broke one insurgent after he gave him a copy of Harry Potter.

David Rose wrote in the December Vanity Fair about insiders who looked into the torture of al-Qaeda recruiter Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

"The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be." [...]

"The White House knew he’d been tortured. I didn’t, though I was supposed to be evaluating that intelligence. ... It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective." ...

As for K.S.M. himself, who (as Jane Mayer writes) was waterboarded, reportedly hung for hours on end from his wrists, beaten, and subjected to other agonies for weeks, Bush said he provided "many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans." K.S.M. was certainly knowledgeable. It would be surprising if he gave up nothing of value. But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., "90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit." A former Pentagon analyst adds: "K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were."

Joe and the other torture-lovers seem to prefer Jack Bauer's approach to that of real-live interrogators like Jack Clooney:

When we speak today of "breaking" a terrorist suspect, many people picture something grim—perhaps a subject curled up in a fetal position and begging for mercy. But it's not what I picture. I worked as a special agent for the FBI's Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002. During that time, my colleagues and I had the chance to question numerous operatives from al-Qaeda. We broke many terrorists. But we did it the right way: by being intelligent and humane. ...

One man we captured was Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed, an al-Qaeda operative behind the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Ali Mohamed had fully expected to be tortured once we took him in. Instead, we assured him that we wouldn't harm him, and we offered to protect his family. Within weeks, we had opened a gold mine of information about al-Qaeda's operations.

Ali Mohamed wasn't unique. We gave our word to every detainee that no harm would come to him or his family. This invariably stunned them, and they would feel more obligated to cooperate. Also, because all information led to more information, detainees were astonished to find out how much we already knew about them—their networks, their families, their histories.

No matter how sophisticated the psychological methods, not everybody talks, of course. And some, facing torture, will say anything to stop the pain and degradation. The truth. Or something completely made up. They'll expose the names of comrades or of people with whom they've had ongoing feuds. Interrogators may get something valuable or, as in the case of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 90% bullshit. So all those who argue for pragmatically abandoning principles to save lives fail from the start. Because, whatever else can be said about pragmatism, the reason for supporting it comes from the fact that it works, whether or not it's just, or moral.

To be fair to the torture-lovers - Republican or Democratic - it must be agreed that torture definitely works to achieve some goals. It can terrorize people, as every fascist, red or black, can attest. It serves as a fine recruiting tool, creating new enemies by the thousands. It puts American soldiers at risk. Most of all it works to transform us into what we say we are not: uncivilized.

Torture is a crime. While U.S. intelligence agencies engaged in torture - even wrote how-to manuals for itself and surrogates long before 9/11 "changed everything" - calling it an "enhanced interrogation technique" does not reduce its criminal nature nor make it patriotic. All the claims by Joe Scarborough and other creatures of the right can never alter that.