A Skeptical view of torture

http://www.examiner.com/x-4112-Skepticism-Examiner~y2009m5d15-The-Skeptical-view-of-torture



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.

an accepted strategy as well. Because Osama got more than he dreamed about in terms of unravelling America than he could ever have wished for.