In their first attempt to inform President Obama on a major intelligence issue, a powerful group of twelve intelligence experts who oppose torture has written a memo to President Obama asking him to investigate and prosecute torture by the Bush Administration. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), consistently challenged pre-war lies and fabricated justifications for the invasion of Iraq, beginning with Colin Powell’s speech to the U.N. in 2003. They were absolutely right – and were ignored by the media.
Now they are battling the widely-accepted lie that torture “works”:
The fact that the exploits of Jack Bauer have injected a dangerous level of fiction and fear among impressionable viewers, and have misled not only interrogators at Guantanamo but also the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Silvestre Reyes – not to mention Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia – leaves no doubt that such illusionary scenarios need to be addressed by professionals with real-life experience.
They insist from professional experience that:
torture tactics are not only ineffective in terms of getting reliable, actionable intelligence but have fueled recruitment by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to the point that, arguably, more U.S. troops have been killed by terrorists bent on revenge for torture than the 3,000 civilians killed on 9/11
As Bob Fertik at Democrats.com put it yesterday:
In effect, Bush’s torture regime created a second “9/11” – only the victims were our soldiers.
Read the VIPS Memo to President Obama on Torture in full here…
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And Mr. Holder?
on the Bush torture would have had my experience in Viet Nam.
I was a language-trained army counter-intelligence officer.
My main job, broadly speaking, had to do with the collection of information. But I saw, somewhat at a distance, two approaches to interrogation.
The ARVN (South Viet Nam Army) often would beat the shit out out of captives and throw them into cages exposed to the burning sun
The CIA guys in the compound next to mine treated their captives pretty much like human beings.
The ARVN information was worth what they beat out of their prisoners, shit.
The CIA information was usually golden.
The link is in my signature. This entry needs to be spread as much as possible.