Dick Cheney Was Lying About Torture - It’s official: torture doesn’t work.

Dick Cheney Was Lying About Torture
By Mark Fallon

It’s official: torture doesn’t work. Waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, did not in fact “produce the intelligence that allowed us to get Osama bin Laden," as former Vice President Dick Cheney asserted in 2011. Those are among the central findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation and detention after 9/11

The report’s executive summary is expected to be released Tuesday. After reviewing thousands of the CIA’s own documents, the committee has concluded that torture was ineffective as an intelligence-gathering technique. Torture produced little information of value, and what little it did produce could’ve been gained through humane, legal methods that uphold American ideals.

I was aware of no valuable information that came from waterboarding. And the Senate Intelligence Committee—which had access to all CIA documents related to the “enhanced interrogation” program—has concluded that abusive techniques didn’t help the hunt for Bin Laden. Cheney’s claim that the frequent waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “produced phenomenal results for us" is simply false.



http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/12/torture-report-dick-cheney-110306.html#.VIb16GTF-Y9




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Marcy Wheeler, the brilliant scholar-blogger who has for years pried deeply into available sources to come up with her extraordinary analyses of some of America's darker moments, points out that torturing information out of captives was only one part of the reason for doing so. Recruiting spies and spreading propaganda were two others.

And the purpose of that propaganda? Tying Iraq to al Qaeda and raising the threat of nuclear or dirty bomb terror:

Then it raises the really horrible possibility that Cheney pushed torture because it would produce the stories he wanted told. It would be difficult to distinguish whether Cheney believed this stuff and therefore that’s what the torture produced or whether Cheney wanted these stories told and that’s what the torture produced.
As Steven Kleinman said in an important Jason Leopold and Jeff Kaye story on this subject, the torture CIA used was designed to get false confessions, not accurate information:

The people who approved torture had the means of knowing—should have known—it would elicit false confessions. It’s just that no one can prove whether that was the entire point or not.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2014/12/08/the-debate-about-torture-were-not-having-exploitation/