From Skepticism Examiner
Regardless of one's personal feelings about the morality of torture, what we are learning now about why suspects were tortured is of utmost concern for Skeptics.
When talking about something like torture, it's important to distinguish between values and facts. I do not deny the importance of ethics and morals, but I think skepticism's primary purpose is to demand a systematic pursuit of knowledge. That is skepticism in a nutshell: the belief in protecting the objective gathering of information so that we can make informed decisions.
Here is what we now know about Cheney's push for more and more extreme techniques to obtain information from detainees:
http://www.examiner.com/...
* In August 2002, Abu Zubaida was providing actionable intelligence and cooperating with his interrogators.
*Zubaida did not, however provide any information about the non-existent link between Iraq and Al Qaeda the White House needed to justify an invasion of Iraq. So, there was a push to employ harsher techniques to get Zubaida to start providing information that backed the Administration's preconceived notions about a relationship any knowledgeable expert or intelligence officer worth his salt knew was absurd.
*Waterboarding was a technique used by the Chinese to obtain false confessions.
*Interrogators bowed to pressure from the White House and waterboarded the cooperating prisoner 83 times to get him to provide information on the non-existent link. At which point, Zubaida stopped providing good information and started making stuff up he thought his interrogators wanted to hear. After waterboarding began, none of the information Zubaida provided thwarted a single plot.
*While all this is going on, the White House is building the drumbeat for war based primarily on a Saddam/bin Laden link and WMD not backed by intelligence.
*The US starts waterboarding another prisoner, Khalid Sheik Muhammed -- 183 times, or about 6 times a day -- as the invasion begins. He also is not able to provide evidence of the non-existent link. Nor is he able to provide information on the non existent WMD.
*Another Iraqi intelligence official is being interrogated. He is cooperative and providing good information. A message comes from Washington with concerns that the interrogation may be too gentle -- because of the lack of information showing Hussein responsible for 9/11-- and that the official was told Muhammed might need to be waterboarded to get him to provide evidence of the non existent link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. That request came from Cheney.
So here, we have detainees who are providing good information suddenly silenced and made hostile and unreliable with the use of waterboarding. Therefore good sources of actionable intelligence were effectively shut down in favor of false information that backed up the fantasies of those in Washington.
As a Skeptic, what enrages me is that, as with intelligence, interrogation was used, not to provide good information with which to act, but to spin and manipulate what should be objective fact-gathering operations to encourage them to provide falsehoods, distortions and mythology that served partisan purposes.
The values debate over whether or not waterboarding ought to be used to make America more safe or to stop a ticking time bomb is moot -- when our leaders set out to back up ideology, any effort of fact-finding is used to compromise sources of good information to make them provide bad. We resorted to torture, not because the prisoners weren't singing, but because they weren't lying.
Now, every time I hear Cheney boast about all the good intelligence waterboarding provided, I wonder if he means the famed Mohammad Atta meeting in Prague that Cheney continues to pimp, years after it was debunked. Now we know how he can be so sure -- because he kept sending the interrogators back to waterboard the detainees until they said what the evidence didn't.
What's more, these techniques justified as means to keep us safe were, in practice, used to obtain political ammo to justify invasion after the fact. Clearly, the White House had cut quite a few corners on intelligence to get us in the war, thinking all the evidence would materialized once they got on the ground. Then, as the rationalizations used to prop up the invasion collapsed under their own weight, and no hard evidence of actual wrong doing began materializing, the White House was becoming more and more desperate to turn the screws to save their hides.
This is why I say the lesson of the last eight years is how terribly things go astray when ideologues seek to back up their prejudices rather than a "judicious study of reality". What the failures of the Bush Administration demonstrate more than anything is why we need Skeptics more than ever before -- because without an honest respect for reality, everything else is compromised.