You Know It When You See It
US policy on torture

Yesterday, speaking with Charlie Gibson on ABC News, CIA Director Porter Goss modeled how to avoid answering questions on torture:

"GIBSON: How do you define it?

"GOSS: Well, I define torture probably the way most people would -- in the eye of the beholder. What we do does not come close because torture in terms of inflicting pain or something like that, physical pain or causing a disability, those kinds of things that probably would be a common definition for most Americans, sort of you know it when you see it, we don't do that because it doesn't get what you want. We do debriefings because debriefings are the nature of our business, is to get information. We want accurate information and we want to make sure that we have professional people doing that work, and we do all that, and we do it in a way that does not involve torture because torture is counterproductive.

"GIBSON: We [ABC News] reported in the past two weeks about having talked to a number of people who have worked and did work in this agency, about six progressive techniques, each one harsher than the last, to get terrorists to talk, including things like long-term standing up, sleep deprivation, exposure for long periods of time to cold rooms or something called 'water-boarding,' which involves cellophane over the face and water being poured on an individual. Do those things take place?

"GOSS: I've got to say there is a huge amount of disinformation out there on this whole subject because probably there's not very much accurate information available. And the reason there's not very much accurate information available about how we do debriefings and how we deal with people who are in detention is very simply, if we told you how we do that, we would be telling them, and that would lose the edge.

"Debriefing" sounds a lot like "collateral damage." Do you think the Bushies read 1984?