More on Abu Zubaydah
A few things I missed in my first read (which I posted about here this morning), Sullivan tackles in a one-two punch of his own.
One important bit is that, contrary to other reporting, Kiriakou believes that the torture yielded valuable information. However, he does note that said information was fished for (they had no idea if he knew anything specific), and was more logistical info about overseas operations, i.e. not in relation to any direct threat to America.
The facts are these: the president of the United States directly broke the law and the Geneva Conventions by authorizing the torture of a prisoner; he did so in the absence of any actual knowledge of any actual, dire threat to the United States; the evidence of the torture has been destroyed.
The Zubaydah torture does not fit the category laid out by Charles Krauthammer as the criterion for legalized torture. It was done not because we knew something and needed to nail it down. It was done because we knew nothing and needed to find out more. The attacks it allegedly foiled were not catastrophic and not on the mainland of the United States.
So this wasn’t a response to some kind of ticking time-bomb scenario. This was a “He seems important. I guess let’s torture him and see what he knows” scenario, as a matter of policy, policy directly authorized by the President (as Sully puts it, “this wasn’t free-lance”).
What’s more, as Kiriakou makes clear, though he thinks he did the right thing, this wasn’t the Brit Hume scenario that the Republican candidates are focused on when they’ll talk about it at all. This isn’t a heroic interrogator knowing that American lives were on the line and that he had to torture him to get it it out and bucking the system to do so. This was a guy that got an order saying “Hey, we’re losing our ass here, torture him”, and, as he puts it, thought “Hrm, the bosses want him tortured. I can’t believe they’d authorize that. Weird. Oh well, better get it then.” Not a sweaty adrenaline-fueled race against the clock, but the most banal kind of normalizing imaginable. This was “Oh, they want us to torture now? Okay I guess.” that went all the way down the chain of command right to Abu Gharib and worse.
Sullivan’s other post relates to the comic-book perception that “real” torture is pulling out fingernails or tearing off limbs, and anything short of that is just uncomfortable, which is how an interrogation should be. Experts, of course, all know that that’s hogwash but conservatives these days, still adrift in a war-hero Jack Bauer delusion, seem to be pretty well invested in fooling themselves.