Torture - An Old Insiders View

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Fester covered it here and BJ covered it here, torture.  After some email discussion our bloglord Steve (AKA Cernig)  asked me to come out of the closet so to speak.  In the late 60s and early 70s I worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, it beat being canon fodder in Vietnam.  I attended the DIA interrogation school as part of my training.  The first thing they taught us is that torture doesn't work.  When you torture people they tell you what they think you want to hear which more often than not is not the truth.  That may explain the Bush/Cheney cabal's support of torture since they were primarily interested in hearing what they wanted to hear not the truth. As a result a great deal of resources are spent chasing false leads while real intelligence is left unresearched because of a lack of resources. 

Steve also asked me if Nuremberg was covered in this training.  This was my response:

As I recall Nuremberg was discussed but you have to remember that back then everyone was familiar with it because it was only 20 years in the past not 60.  Many of the people in the Intelligence community had been around for Nuremberg.  That may be part of the problem - Nuremberg was a really long time ago and those who were involved are for the most part dead. 

John Cole says:

And yes, this is nothing but pure sadism.

And that is basically what both Fester and BJ are saying.  I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far.  It was indeed wrong and non-productive at best or counter productive at worst.  But there can be little doubt it soiled the reputation of the United States and accomplished little.