NO TORTURE. NO EXCEPTIONS….Jack Cloonan talks about his experience as a terrorist interrogator:
I worked as a special agent for the FBI’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002. During that time, my colleagues and I had the chance to question numerous operatives from al-Qaeda.
We broke many terrorists. But we did it the right way: by being intelligent and humane. One man we captured was Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed, an al-Qaeda operative behind the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Ali Mohamed had fully expected to be tortured once we took him in. Instead, we assured him that we wouldn’t harm him, and we offered to protect his family. Within weeks, we had opened a gold mine of information about al-Qaeda’s operations.
….Intelligence failures had much to do with the atrocity of September 11, but those had nothing to do with a lack of torture. Let me be clear on one crucial point: it is the terrorists whom we won over with humane methods in the 1990s who continue to provide the most reliable intelligence we have in the fight against al-Qaeda. And it is the testimony of terrorists we tortured after 9/11 who have provided the most unreliable information, such as stories about a close connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Read the whole thing. And then ask yourself again: why did John McCain vote against a bill that would have outlawed CIA torture? And why did George Bush veto it? Instead of giving in to schoolyard revenge fantasies, shouldn’t we insist that our intelligence agencies do the job right? Or is demonstrating “toughness” more important?
