However, a warning that torture should be avoided came from Robert Blitzer, a former head of the FBI's counter-terrorism section. He said that the practice "goes against every grain in my body. Chances are you are going to get the wrong person and risk damage or killing them."
Cheers, Ken Hanly
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Yeah, the note the other day about torture was interesting. It occurred to me, that torture does have a bright side---the potential risk of torturing its own elocutioners. Consider this.
For the FBI and DOJ to resort to torture, excessively brutal interrogations, and indefinite detentions is a prima facia admission of defeat. It could be the authorities have almost no case. The problem isn't the silence of those held---they might not know much more than they have already been coerced through the usual methods of intimidation into admitting.
It could be that all the leads trace back to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and EU banks who for their own political stability have stone walled the US investigations. That leaves the domestic authorities with nothing but torturing false confessions out of those picked up with little or no probable cause.
Torturing a conspiracy theory out of non-conspirators has a serious downside that must have occurred to the FBI. If they go ahead and force testimony and create a case out of it that supports the current administrations war policy, then they open themselves up to a monstrous credibility exposure. Suppose that later investigators re-trace the same leads and find that the Bush administration was protecting its own foreign policy decisions and its theoretical allies, and using the FBI terrorist case which they knew to be false?
What if there is no immediately demonstrable and direct connection to ObL, the Taliban and Afghanistan? What if it was all another group in Egypt and Saudi Arabia spinning off of the same sources as ObL? If the FBI constructs a case against ObL from testimony had through torture, they will never be able to regain enough credibility to demonstrate a real link if they can finally shake one down later---or worse, if they finally do locate some other group.
Bush already exposed himself to these same problems since he just declared war on Afghanistan a priori. Now his administration has to use the FBI investigation as the justification ex post facto. If there is no case, well, guess what? Deep doodoo, boys and girls, very deep.
The Bush administration has set itself up for a tremendous fall. The FBI can conceivably stall for a few more months, but by the beginning of next year there had better be some real indictments and a case forth coming. If not, then this whole thing is going to start spinning out of control and begin that long dark desperate journey we have all come to know and love: following the path of covering up a cover up, that covers up what can't be covered up.
So the mention of torture the other day in the news, was a kind of twisted bright note. Oh, this could get good. Perhaps the best is, indeed yet to come.
Chuck Grimes