The Bush Torture Memos and Hayden's Tortured Logic

Former CIA chief Michael Hayden continued his attacks on the release of the torture memos on Fox News, saying, "What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al Qaeda terrorist. That's very valuable information."

But it is tortured logic to believe that because Al-Qaeda suspects would no longer fear water boarding, that they would somehow be stronger and more able to resist. If water boarding was so effective they wouldnt have had to use it 266 times on two prisoners to get information,

More than anything, the release of the memo embarrasses Hayden and members of the Bush administration because it tends to prove the opposite of everything they had been claiming.

Hayden said,"By taking techniques off the table, we have made it more difficult in a whole host of circumstances I can imagine, more difficult for CIA officers to defend the nation."

A close look at just one of the points in the memos shows that Hayden's ability to imagine was more potent than the torture techniques applied. We were told that valuable information was obtained through the use of water boarding and that it was an effective technique. Experts in the field of interrogation such as the FBI's Ali Soufan, the most successful Al-Qaeda interrorgator in the U.S. have said those techniques are virtually worthless in obtaining valuable information.

According to one of the memos, the CIA used water boarding on two Al-Qaeda officials 266 times. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if the technique was that good, using it once might have been enough to get the information they wanted from a prisoner. The fact that they had to do it 266 times to two prisoners does more to prove the argument by many intelligence professionals that it's an ineffective technique and does not produce accurate actionable information than anything Hayden or Cheney could say to the contrary.

The next big question will be whether to hold members of the Bush Administration including the former President himself, accountable for what was clearly a violation of US law imposed on the CIA by White House directives.

Sources:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1893679,00.html?cnn=yes

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/world/21detain.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss