And Now for Something Completely Different...

As Liss mentioned yesterday, FBI agent Ali Soufan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques torture. The bad news for the sadistic apologists out there is that Mr. Soufan's words carry a little more weight due to his being present at these interrogations, unlike just about everyone else.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. [...]

Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.

I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that this entire issue is even open to debate. Granted, some of it is due to nuance and the use of a thesaurus. But still, we're actually at the point where there are plenty of people who truly believe that torture can be justified. That's certainly a valid argument against evolution, but that's a whole different post.

Or is it?

[H/T to C&L]