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That’s the message of a 6,300-page report prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will vote Thursday on whether to forward an executive summary to President Obama.
The report is said to contain damning information about the C.I.A.'s creepy fetish for "harsh interrogation techniques," which people not employed by the Agency tend to refer to as torture.
The C.I.A., according to a Washington Post summary of the report, misrepresented its activities to the civilian government that’s supposed to keep it in check in three major ways: by hiding some of its most abusive “techniques,” by inflating the importance of the people they abused and the plots they desperately described, and by taking credit for intelligence that was divulged not during harsh interrogations but under traditional questioning.
Some of the report's findings, including details about a vast network of “black sites” located around the world, are new. Much of this, however, has been known for quite some time.
Way back in 2007, Katherine Eban published an article on VF.com titled “Rorschach and Awe,” describing the way Agency operatives, under direct orders from Director George Tenet, had interrupted a successful, rapport-based F.B.I. interrogation of al-Qaeda flunky Abu Zubaydah, so they could introduce a new set of bizarre tactics that would “get him to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death.”
The only trouble was, Zubaydah had coughed up all his best information during the friendly F.B.I. interrogation. No matter: to defend its new tactics, the C.I.A. just lied and took all the credit.
If you're wondering why people in the know got so upset at the 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, with its depiction of haunted but well-meaning patriots pushing moral boundaries in pursuit of actionable intelligence, this is your answer. The movie portrayed torture as a necessary evil, when in fact it was more like a warped fraternity ritual—or a crime ring.
Worst of all, there is ample evidence—obvious to anyone not actively trying to justify practicing it—that torture simply doesn't work. People will say anything when they’re being dunked in ice water or having their head bashed against a wall, which means that torture produces a windfall of fabrications and false leads.
In a story published in the December 2008 issue of Vanity Fair, David Rose describes how Abu Zubaydah, having suffered weeks of torture, served up a bogus story about a dirty-bomb plot that sent the C.I.A. fanning out in search of new suspects to waterboard and otherwise mistreat. And so the cycle continued—at taxpayer expense, naturally.
September 11, the Bush years, and even the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may be receding into history, but the Senate’s report will be relevant as long as there are Americans who, misled by a steady diet of cop shows and the occasional Oscar contender, continue to believe that, however morally repugnant it may be, torture works.
It doesn't, and there’s a 6,300-page document circulating on Capitol Hill that proves it.
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