I agree with you BUT ..... I'd like to point out that our military sure as hell has done something to keep Americans safe and they too have used waterboarding and other techniques to make a detained enemy talk. There's no denying that.
CS, you've been watching too much 24, we get more BAD intel from torture than you seemingly can fathom. Interrogators have known for decades that torture has VERY limited utility in extracting information. Building rapport and trust with a suspected bad guy produces real intelligence versus lies extracted through the end of a cattle prod.
The C.I.A.,
according to a Washington Post summary of the report, misrepresented its activities to the civilian government that's supposed to keep it in check in three major ways: by hiding some of its most abusive "techniques," by inflating the importance of the people they abused and the plots they desperately described, and by taking credit for intelligence that was divulged not during harsh interrogations but under traditional questioning.
Some of the report's findings, including details about a vast network of "black sites" located around the world, are new. Much of this, however, has been known for quite some time. Way back in 2007, Katherine Eban
published an article on VF.com titled "Rorschach and Awe," describing the way Agency operatives, under direct orders from Director George Tenet, had interrupted a successful, rapport-based F.B.I. interrogation of al-Qaeda flunky Abu Zubaydah, so they could introduce a new set of bizarre tactics that would "get him to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death."
The only trouble was, Zubaydah had coughed up all his best information during the friendly F.B.I. interrogation. No matter: to defend its new tactics, the C.I.A. just lied and took all the credit.
