To Torture Or Not To Torture?
Walter Pincus has been around Washington for a very long time. He's of the old school of investigative reporting; when you read something with his byline you can pretty much take what he says to the bank. (I've never found an error in anything he's reported that I've known about but, full disclosure, his former Washington Post investigative partner, Don Oberdorfer — now retired — was the guy I went to in 1991 when I resigned from the State Department and, after two days of debriefings, it was Don's story on me that made the front page of the Post.) It's worth knowing a bit about Walter because otherwise his story this morning about the spat between the CIA and FBI over the usefulness of torture might get lost in Washington's usual signal to noise ratio.
Walter reports that so far as Abu Zubaida is concerned, the FBI believes information extracted from him through torture was worthless, while the CIA thinks it was critical, actionable intelligence. Here, I have no doubt that the FBI is right, not only because of what we already know about the effectiveness of torture (it's nil), but because given this administration's obsessive self-aggrandizement it's inconceivable that they would have discovered and thwarted any significant plot without trying to turn it into a headline. Remember Zacharias Moussaoui's "dirty bomb"?
Before the morons in Congress get stampeded into giving up any more constitutional rights when it comes to the U.S. practice of torture, or for that matter dropping the issue of destroyed torture tapes, they now at least have an opportunity, if they choose to exercise any substantive oversight, to ask questions of the FBI regarding Abu Zubaida. Keep an eye on this: if the CIA/FBI argument doesn't attract congressional attention it'll be another pretty good indication that nobody up there knows what they're doing anymore.
Posted by George Kenney on December 18, 2007 11:48 PM 
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