The Continuing Debate About What Should Be Undebatable
More criticism of Cheney's "torture option"


By now you may have figured out that torture is abhorrent to me. It's embarrassing for the world to see us debating whether to live by international law. Thus I proudly present excerpts from an editorial in today's LATimes by Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA officer, was a deputy director of the State Department Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993.

I think Dick Cheney has been watching too many Hollywood flicks that glorify torture. He needs to get out of his undisclosed location and talk to the people on the ground.

I'm a former CIA officer and a former counterterrorism official. During the last few months, I have spoken with three good friends who are CIA operations officers, all of whom have worked on terrorism at the highest levels. They all agree that torturing detainees will not help us. In fact, they believe that it will hurt us in many ways.

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Two of my friends, one a classmate from hostage school, served in Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Some Americans believe that the suicide attack on the World Trade Center justifies using all techniques to get information from terrorist suspects. But my friends recognize correctly that their mission is to gather intelligence, not to create new enemies.

If you inflict enough pain on someone, they will give you information, but what they tell you may not be true. You will have to corroborate it, which will take time. And, unless you kill every suspect you brutalize, you will make enemies of them, their families, maybe their entire villages. What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust — even with a terrorist, even if it's time-consuming — than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets, who believed that national security always trumped human rights.

And that's the point. We should never use our fear of being attacked as justification for dehumanizing ourselves or others.

For help to take action against torture as well as unfair budget cuts go to: http://www.sojo.net/