Condoleezza Rice: It Wasn't Torture (Because the President Ordered It)

Two days ago, we flashed back to the 2003 legal framework for the Bush Administration's authorisation of torture (Mora: "Are you saying the President has the authority to order torture?”; White House lawyer John Yoo: "Yes"). In case you thought that was simply a rogue comment, consider this exchange between a questioner and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University (it begins at about 0:58 in the clip):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prxin-Lj5Ks[/youtube]

In case you didn't catch it, Rice says, "the president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture....And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture."

In other words, Bush's supposed word absolved his officials of any necessity to consider US or international law, let alone ethics and morality, in the discussion from waterboarding to sleep deprivation to confinement in small boxes to the throwing of detainees against walls.

And, incidentally, Rice is also splitting hairs in her other defense, "I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department's clearance." Set this against the recently-released findings of the Senate Armed Services Committee:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was then the National Security Advisor, said that, "In the spring of 2002, CIA sought policy approval from the National Security Council (NSC) to begin an interrogation program for high-level al-Qaida terrorists." Secretary Rice said that she asked Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet to brief NSC Principals on the program and asked the Attorney General John Ashcroft "personally to review and confrrm the legal advice prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel".

Policy approval. If Rice and her colleagues say no in the spring of 2002 to the CIA's request, then the torture does not proceed. It was their approval, however, that launched the range of techniques that were first applied to detainees at Guantanamo Bay and, eventually, in Iraq in prisons like Abu Ghraib.

Enduring America Special: Why Torture Matters

Featured Post: Andy Worthington - Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?
Featured Post: Mark Danner - If Everyone Knew, Who’s to Blame?
Featured Post: Frank Rich - Why Torture Matters: The Banality of Bush White House Evil

This morning, I was catching up with the newspapers when a friend/reader Skyped about our recent item, "Dick Cheney's Fox Interview and the Defence of Torture": "Surely there must be some date by which I can hope to never ever see Cheney's face on EA again."

While I could understand the sentiment, it also brought on depression about how this torture discussion will probably "go away". The barrage of news stories and commentary --- now that many in the American "mainstream" media, with the Bush Administration in the rear-view mirror, has decided torture should be noticed --- brings on fatigue. Now that Cheney, formerly the most secretive Vice President in history, has decided that he will incessantly shine his own distorted light on "enhanced interrogation", I have the sense from his smirk that he knows he is wearing us down.

Meanwhile, beyond the shrillness of knee-jerk comment on torture protecting us from another 9-11 and the silliness of "what's wrong with putting man in a box with a caterpillar?", those who claim a bit of knowledge are spinning the reasons why we should just walk away. It's not just the former Bush Administration officials --- now Porter Goss, the former (hapless) Director of the CIA, is writing, "We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets", when the only secret in danger is who in the Bush Administration authorised torture and when.

David Ignatius in The Washington Post plays sage referee, "[The Obama Administration] needs to take care that the sunlight of exposure doesn't blind its shadow warriors", even though the exposure does not threaten our "shadow warriors" but those who have now left office. Walter Pincus, the long-time intelligence beat reporter of The Post loses both the plot, "The CIA Will Pay the Price", and his grip on facts, spreading the implication (discredited by his own newspaper) that torture provided valuable intelligence:

The pages of the Justice Department opinions contain many references to important information learned from Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

And David Broder, in a piece that should stand as a reminder of why eminent journalists are not toothless but complicit in the
activities of the Government they claim to watch, reduces the quest for answers and, yes, justice to "an unworthy desire for vengeance".

It's enough to make me throw up hands and settle for the complications of a policy on Iran or Afghanistan or even a light-hearted look at the latest escapade in the Culture Wars. Then, in the midst of this growing depression, I remembered that I wrote last October:

How did an American government, in the name of "freedom" and "democracy", sanction these activities?

The demand for that answer should never be given up. By coincidence, a book titled After Bush is being formally launched in London today. Amongst its many egregious errors, distortions, and distractions is this sentence: "'Prisoner abuses’ were aberrations --- recurrent in every war --- rather than the logical consequence of the authority under which Bush acted.”

These were abuses --- without the quote marks. They were not aberrations. They were not just the logical outcomes, they were the intended outcomes of a policy developed from September 2001 by the Bush Administration, led by a Vice President dedicated to the expansion of his personal power and that of the Executive, supported by second-level officials like John Yoo happy to promote their own perversions of legality, and abetted by colleagues from Condoleezza Rice to Colin Powell to George Tenet who were either too cowed to fight back or too intent on covering their own backsides.

Any attempt to pretend otherwise, that we can just whisk away torture as a silly little aberration, is a disgrace to those of us who believe that "America" should stand for something beyond the expedient and the power-hungry.

I still believe that. So today Enduring America features three opinion pieces and analyses --- by Frank Rich of The New York Times and by historians Mark Danner and Andy Worthington, that offer both answers and reasons why we should never forget.

Why Torture Matters: Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Featured Post: Mark Danner - If Everyone Knew, Who’s to Blame?
Featured Post: Frank Rich - Why Torture Matters: The Banality of Bush White House Evil

Andy Worthington in AlterNet

For the defendants of the use of torture by U.S. forces -- still led by former Vice President Dick Cheney -- this has been a rocky few weeks, with the publication, in swift succession, of the leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (PDF), based on interviews with the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, which concluded that their treatment “constituted torture” (and was accompanied by two detailed articles by Mark Danner for the New York Review of Books), the release, by the Justice Department, of four memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2002 and 2005, which purported to justify the use of torture by the CIA, and the release of a 231-page investigation into detainee abuse conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee (PDF.)

The publication of the full Senate Committee report was delayed for four months, subject to wrangling over proposed redactions, but the Executive Summary, published last December, had already successfully demolished the Bush administration’s claims that detainee abuse could be blamed on “a few bad apples,” and, instead, blamed it on senior officials who, with the slippery exception of Dick Cheney, included George W. Bush, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington, former Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Justice Department legal adviser John Yoo, former Guantánamo commanders Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq.

Much of the fallout from the release of these memos and reports has, understandably, focused on the inadequacy of the legal advice offered to the CIA for its “high-value detainee” program by the OLC, whose lawyers have the unique responsibility of interpreting the law as it relates to the powers of the executive branch, and whose advice, therefore, provided the Bush administration with what it regarded as a “golden shield,” which would prevent senior officials from being prosecuted for war crimes. However, if it can be shown that the OLC’s advice was not only inadequate, but also tailored to specific requests from senior officials, then it may be that the “golden shield” will turn to dust.

This threat to the “golden shield” probably explain why Dick Cheney’s scaremongering has been shriller than usual in the last few weeks, but what has largely been overlooked to date is another question that poses even weightier challenges for the former administration: if the use of torture techniques on Abu Zubaydah, the first supposedly significant “high-value detainee” captured by the US (on March 28, 2002), was authorized by two OLC memos issued on August 1, 2002, then who authorized the torture to which he was subjected in the 18 weeks between his capture and the moment that Jay S. Bybee, the head of the OLC, added his signature to the OLC memos?

It’s clear that the major reason this question has been overlooked is because, as the ICRC report reveals, Zubaydah was not subjected to waterboarding (an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning) until after the memo was issued, but what is also apparent is that the treatment to which he was subjected before the waterboard was introduced also “constituted torture.”

Zubaydah was severely wounded during his capture in Faisalabad, Pakistan, to the extent that, as President Bush explained in a press conference in September 2006, shortly after Zubaydah and 13 other “high-value detainees” had been transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons, “he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.” We don’t know if there is any truth to the allegation, made by Ron Suskind in his 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine, that medication was only administered in exchange for his cooperation (it seems likely, but has been officially denied), but we do know, from James Risen’s book State of War, that when CIA director George Tenet told the President that Zubaydah had been put on pain medication to deal with the injuries he sustained during capture, Bush asked Tenet, “Who authorized putting him on pain medication?” which prompted Risen to wonder whether the President was “implicitly encouraging” Tenet to order the harsh treatment of a prisoner “without the paper trail that would have come from a written presidential authorization.”

We also know that, shortly after his capture, Zubaydah was flown to Thailand, to a secret underground prison provided by the Thai government, where, as a New York Times article in September 2006 explained, “he was stripped, held in an icy room and jarred by earsplittingly loud music -- the genesis of practices later adopted by some within the military, and widely used by the Central Intelligence Agency in handling prominent terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons.”

The details of his treatment, “based on accounts by former and current law enforcement and intelligence officials,” were even more shocking. We have become somewhat inured, over the years, to stories of prisoners deprived of sleep for disturbing long periods of time, in which the use of loud, non-stop music -- in this case, the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- played an integral part.

This in itself is unacceptable, as the use of music is not simply a matter of being forced to listen to the same song over and over again at ear-splitting volume, but is, instead, a component in a program of sleep deprivation and isolation designed to provoke a complete mental breakdown. One of the major reference points for the CIA in the 1950s, when it was deeply involved in investigating the efficacy of psychological torture techniques, was research conducted by Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, who discovered that, “if subjects are confined without light, odor, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked,” and that, within just 48 hours, those held in what he termed “perceptual isolation” can be reduced to semi-psychotic states.

However, while some interpretation and empathy is required to understand the impact on Abu Zubaydah of his profound isolation in this period, in which, as the Times also reported, he was largely cut off from all human interaction, only occasionally punctuated by an interrogator entering his cell, saying, “You know what I want,” and then leaving, there is no denying the visceral impact of the following description. “At times, Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, was stripped and placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets,” the Times explained. “He stood or lay on the bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that, one official said, Mr. Zubaydah seemed to turn blue” (emphasis added).

Further information about Zubaydah’s treatment in Thailand has not emerged in great detail. In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer noted only that he was “held naked in a small cage, like a dog,” and the ICRC report focused instead on his detention in Afghanistan, from May 2002 to February 2003. What we do know, however, from the Senate Committee’s report, is that an FBI agent was so appalled by his treatment at the hands of CIA agents that he “raised objections to these techniques to the CIA and told the CIA it was ‘borderline torture,’” and that, sometime later, FBI director Robert Mueller “decided that FBI agents would not participate in interrogations involving techniques the FBI did not normally use in the United States.” We also know from Jane Mayer that R. Scott Shumate, the chief operational psychologist for the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, left his job in 2003, apparently disgusted by developments involving the use of the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and that “associates described him as upset in particular about the treatment of Zubaydah.”

Moreover, although the ICRC report dealt only with Zubaydah’s treatment in Afghanistan, it’s also clear that the techniques to which he was subjected in Afghanistan, in the approximately two and a half months before the OLC memos were signed, also “constituted torture.”

In his statement to the ICRC, Zubaydah explained how, even before the waterboarding began, he was strapped naked to a chair for several weeks in a cell that was “air-conditioned and very cold,” deprived of food, subjected to extreme sleep deprivation for two to three weeks -- partly by means of loud music or incessant noise, and partly because, “If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face” -- and, for the rest of the time, until the waterboarding began, was subjected to further sleep deprivation, and kept in a state of perpetual fear.

This array of techniques undoubtedly appears less dramatic than the “real torturing” that followed (in which the waterboarding was accompanied by physical brutality, hooding, the daily shaving of his hair and beard, and confinement in small boxes), but, again, it is critical to try to imagine what two to three weeks of chronic sleep deprivation actually means, and to recall that, by the time Steven G. Bradbury, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, revised the approval for torture techniques in May 2005, it was noted that it was only considered acceptable to subject a prisoner to 180 hours (seven and a half days) of sleep deprivation.

To understand how torture came to be used before it was officially approved, we need to return to the New York Times article of September 2006, which explained how, according to accounts by three former intelligence officials, the CIA “understood that the legal foundation for its role had been spelled out in a sweeping classified directive” signed by President Bush on September 17, 2001, which authorized the agency “to capture, detain and interrogate terrorism suspects.”

Significantly, this “memorandum of notification” did not spell out specific guidelines for interrogations, but as later research, and the latest reports have confirmed, the directive led to focused efforts by the CIA, and by William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s General Counsel (and a protégé of Dick Cheney), to contact foreign governments for advice on harsh interrogation techniques, and to begin a relationship with a number of individuals involved in the Joint Personnel Recovery Program (JPRA), the body responsible for administering the SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), which is taught at U.S. military schools.

Designed to teach military personnel how to resist interrogation if captured by a hostile enemy, the SERE program uses outlawed techniques derived from techniques used on captured U.S. soldiers during the Korean War to elicit deliberately false confessions, and includes, as the Senate Committee report explained, “stripping detainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures.” In some circumstances, the techniques also include waterboarding, and, as numerous sources -- including the recently released reports and memos -- have revealed over the last few years, the reverse-engineering of the SERE techniques constituted the bedrock of the administration’s interrogation program, from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo to the secret dungeons of the CIA.

As we also know, from the pioneering research conducted by Jane Mayer, by the time that the CIA took over Zubaydah’s interrogation from the FBI, in April 2002, the team included Dr. David Mitchell, a retired Air Force SERE psychologist. Thanks to the detailed timeline provided by the Senate Committee, we now know that it was Haynes who first inquired about the applicability of the SERE program to the interrogation of prisoners in December 2001, and we also know that, in April 2002, while “experienced intelligence officers were making recommendations to improve intelligence collection” -- which, noticeably, included an assessment by Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, that a regime based solely on punishment “detracts from the flexibility that debriefers require to accomplish their mission” -- “JPRA officials with no training or experience were working on their own exploitation plan,” and a colleague of Mitchell’s, Bruce Jessen, a senior SERE psychologist, was providing recommendations for JPRA involvement in the “exploitation of select al-Qaeda detainees” in an “exploitation facility” to be established especially for the purpose -- which, presumably, turned out to be the secret dungeon provided by the Thai government.

We also know from Mayer that discussions about the CIA’s proposed interrogation techniques, in April 2002, involved numerous other senior officials -- beyond the key involvement of Haynes -- in meetings in the White House’s Situation Room that were chaired by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and attended by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, and, moreover, that the level of detail provided by Tenet appalled Ashcroft to such an extent that he lamented, “History will not judge us kindly.”

This is disturbing enough, but what makes it even more chilling is the realization that the tactics being discussed, which, it is clear, led swiftly to their enactment in actual interrogations, were some months away from being authorized by the OLC. As the Times article explained, in what was perhaps its most damning passage, “Three former intelligence officials said the techniques had been drawn up on the basis of legal guidance from the Justice Department, but were not yet supported by a formal legal opinion.”

In my book, this means that, regardless of the validity of the OLC’s opinions, those who authorized the torture of Abu Zubaydah between March 28 and July 31, 2002 are not protected by the OLC’s supposed “golden shield,” and should be prosecuted for contravening the prohibition on the use of torture that, since 1988, has been enshrined in U.S. law. This may not apply to all of those who attended the meetings in the White House (plus Haynes), but it’s inconceivable that the CIA began subjecting Abu Zubaydah to chronic isolation and sleep deprivation with receiving approval from somebody in high office.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the Obama administration is committed to abiding by the laws that President Obama praised so lavishly during his election campaign, or whether, instead, he and his administration are committed to reading from a different book: How to Torture With Impunity And Get Away With It, by former Vice President Dick Cheney and an array of associates, all intoxicated with the thrill of unfettered executive power, which concludes by claiming that you get away with breaking any damn law that you please, so long as you’re voted out of office at the end.

Why Torture Matters: If Everyone Knew, Who's to Blame?

Featured Post: Andy Worthington - Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?
Featured Post: Frank Rich - Why Torture Matters: The Banality of Bush White House Evil

Mark Danner in The Washington Post

Here's a question: When was the last time American officials waterboarded a detainee? Well, that would be 2003 -- six years ago. Here's another: When did Americans first find out about it? That would be 2004 -- five years ago. May 13, 2004, to be precise, in an article in the New York Times that informed readers that "C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as 'water boarding,' in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown."

The first paradox of the torture scandal is that it is not about things we didn't know but about things we did know and did nothing about. Beginning more than a half-dozen years ago, Bush administration officials broke the law and did repugnant things to detainees under their control. But if you think that the remedy is simple and clear -- that all officials who broke the law should be tried and punished -- then ask yourself what exactly the political elite of the country has been doing for the last five years. Or what it has not been doing. And why.

However much we would like the scandal to be confined to the story of what was done in those isolated rooms on the other side of the world where interrogators plied their arts, and in the air-conditioned government offices where officials devised "legal" rationales, the story includes a second narrative that tells of a society that knew about these things and chose to do nothing.

Unlike Watergate or Iran-contra, today's scandal emerges not from a shocking revelation of wrongdoing but from a long process of disclosure during which Americans have stared at blatant lawbreaking with apparent equanimity. This means Democrats as well as Republicans, including those in Congress who were willing to approve, as late as September 2006, a law, the Military Commissions Act, that purported to shield those who had applied these "enhanced interrogation techniques" from prosecution under the War Crimes Act.

Though they could have filibustered the bill, Democrats let it pass into law. The midterm elections loomed, and it was no secret that the president had introduced the bill partly as a trap -- a little bait that might allow any Democrat who spoke up against it to be accused of wanting to "coddle terrorists." Having been burned by the "politics of fear" in 2002 and 2004, Democrats stood aside. Six weeks later, they won control of Congress.

The dirty little secret of the torture scandal and of all the loud expressions of outrage now clogging the country's airwaves is that until very recently, the politics of torture cut in the opposite direction. This is why, although we have known the general narrative of torture since the summer of 2004, most politicians have been loath to do anything about it. Republicans ordered it and, then as now, supported its use -- as long as they could call it something else. Democrats, on the defensive since 9/11 as the party of weakness on national security, saw no interest in taking up a cause perceived to be deeply unpopular. In the wake of 9/11, taking the gloves off was a badge of authenticity. Did Democrats really want to make themselves the party that stood for the rights of Khalid Sheik Mohammed?

The answer to this question, until recently, was no -- as long, that is, as Americans could be assured that torture, called by whatever euphemism, was necessary to keep the country safe. Which is why Republicans from Dick Cheney on down have been unflagging in their arguments that these "enhanced interrogation techniques . . . were absolutely crucial" to preventing "a major-casualty attack." This argument, still strongly supported by a great many Americans, is deeply pernicious, for it holds that it is impossible to protect the country without breaking the law. It says that the professed principles of the United States, if genuinely adhered to, doom the country to defeat. It reduces our ideals and laws to a national decoration, to be discarded at the first sign of danger.

This is why torture is at its heart a political scandal and why its resolution lies in destroying the thing done, not the people who did it. It is this idea of torture that must be destroyed: torture as a badge worn proudly to prove oneself willing to "do anything" to protect the country. That leads to the second paradox of torture: Even after all we know, the political task at hand -- the first task, without which none of the others, including prosecutions, can follow -- remains one of full and patient and relentless revelation of what was done and what it cost the country, authoritative revelation undertaken by respected people of both parties whose words will be heard and believed.

The outlines, long known, are being filled in. Several weeks ago I published in the New York Review of Books the report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which gave detailed first-person accounts of those who were tortured at "the black sites." Shortly thereafter, the Obama administration released four memorandums written by Justice Department lawyers that "made legal" the torture described in the Red Cross report. These are chilling documents, linked hand in hand in a bureaucratic danse macabre: detainees' accounts of what was clearly torture and lawyers' twisted rationale of why it was not.

The irony is that those Justice Department memos were written for just this moment: the moment when all would come to light. That they exist is a chronicle of scandal foretold. The memos are the true offspring of the Church Commission, the mid-1970s investigation of CIA wrongdoing that looms over this scandal and that changed forever how covert actions were conducted. Before Church, "black ops" were undertaken with no explicit legal order: If wrongdoing came to light, the president denied knowledge. After Church, the president was required to sign a "finding" making approval explicit. For former Vice President Cheney and others, the findings and other reforms that followed from Church -- including FISA and other laws that limited the president's power to use the CIA -- were in essence when "the gloves went on."

And so, after 9/11, when the gloves came off, there would be no deniability: All was documented with lawyers' briefs and study group reports and official signatures. That leads to the third paradox of torture: Responsibility is spread so broadly, beginning, as they say, "at the highest level," that the political problem is not whether, eventually, to prosecute but whom, and how high. Too many are implicated: George Tenet and others at the CIA saw to that. They foresaw precisely this moment, and they were determined, when the music stopped, not to be the only ones left standing with no chair.

And now, as the great clangorous machinery of Washington scandal rumbles into life, everywhere one looks former officials stand, without chairs and without places to hide.

If justice is allowed to follow its course, then some prosecutions will eventually come, but they alone cannot lead us back to political health. For that, President Obama and Congress need to authorize an authoritative bipartisan investigation of what was done and how, for that is the only way to destroy definitively the idea that the United States must torture to defend itself. For the moment, the president, an ambitious leader who wants to "look forward" and not back, sees only the political costs of such an inquiry, which will be considerable. But the country has already incurred those costs and the damage in not paying them now will be far greater.

Like most mystiques built on secrecy, the mystique of torture will only disappear once a cold hard light has been shone on it by trustworthy people who can examine all the evidence and speak to the country with authority. We need an investigation that will ruthlessly analyze the controversial and persistent assertions that torture averted attacks and will place alongside them the evidence that it has done great harm to the United States, not only to the country's reputation for following and upholding the law but also to its ability to render justice. In torturing Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his fellows we have created a class of permanent martyrs, unjustly imprisoned in the eyes of the world because they cannot be legitimately tried and punished. We have let torture destroy justice.

Those who break the law should be punished. This includes those who torture no less than those who kill. But prosecutions of those who tortured, if they come before a public investigation, will not end the argument. On the contrary, they will appear to much of the country as yet another partisan turn in the bitter politics of national security, launched to persecute those who only did what was necessary to protect the country. They will encourage those who defend torture to espouse even more bitterly a corrosive counter-narrative according to which only those who torture can be trusted to protect Americans.

To expose this dark counter-narrative to the light of day, to flood it with light and then destroy it, is the vital political task, not only for today but for tomorrow, when the pressures to believe it, in the wake of a further act of mass destruction could well prove irresistible. If that happens, America will become something wholly different -- and the paradoxes of torture will have entangled us all.

War on Terror Watch: Putting Away the "Torture is Effective" Argument

Over the weekend, former Bush Administration officials continued blowing smoke that the release of Government memoranda confirming the authorisation of torture was a "threat to national security" (rather than admitting that they are trying to cover up their roles in an illegal and ineffective programme). There was also some media silliness, notably a lengthy piece by Scott Shane in The New York Times that offered the choice, "Would you rather be tortured or hit by a Hellfire missile?" (Scott, I believe the answer is, "Neither.")

Two articles, however, got to the heart of the matter: the Bush-era torture didn't work.
Ironically, the first is by the same Scott Shane of the insipid "waterboarding or death by missile" dilemma:

The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Qaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal memorandum. The escalation to especially brutal interrogation tactics against the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, including confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall, was ordered by officials at C.I.A. headquarters based on a highly inflated assessment of his importance, interviews and a review of newly released documents show. Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case.

Shane's piece, which follows an even better investigation by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick of The Washington Post, confirms:

1. The first priority for key members of the Bush Administration, based in the Vice President's office and the Department of Defense and supported by the Office of Legal Counsel, was to get acceptance that "enhanced interrogation" could and would be used. 2. Those officials wanted a "demonstration case" for the techniques. To justify that, they needed a "high-value" detainee. They didn't have one at this point (this was before the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, one of the 9-11 planners), so they exaggerated intelligence to create one. 3. Senior CIA officials, probably including Director George Tenet, supported this and overruled CIA personnel "on the ground" who had better knowledge of Abu Zubaydah and the information he was giving. 3. The torture of Abu Zubaydah set aside an interrogation which was providing some useful information and instead led to inaccurate and false statements. At the website Firedoglake, "Emptywheel" pulls out an important detail from the torture memoranda:

The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammad].

To put that number in perspective, Emptywheel notes this paragraph:

...where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

That adds up to a maximum --- for 12 minutes in a 24-hour period --- of 90 waterboarding in a month, only 1/2 of the actual treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. Yet, six years later, despite this extraordinary application of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, Bush Administration defenders of torture still cannot point to one significant piece of intelligence produced by the waterboardings.