Man, ABC News seriously loves them some torture.
Because for them, the Bin Laden capture and killing is a triumph of intelligence derived from waterboarding, therefore the question of whether we should continue to torture should very much still be on the table. And who better to confirm that than the poster girl for waterboarding, Liz "Demon Spawn" Cheney.
But as I've written before, there's a logic drop off to their allegations. By all accounts, the use of waterboarding stopped in 2003. The Bush Administration closed down the Bin Laden unit in 2005 and did nothing for the intervening five years. If there was actionable intelligence obtained by waterboarding, why then did they close down the unit hunting for Bin Laden?
What Leon Panetta told the media was that they did receive actionable intelligence from individuals who had been waterboarded in the past but the name of the courier that enabled them to directly track Bin Laden was not known until 2007, after waterboarding allegedly ended. But the media en masse, with their giant hard on for Jack Bauer theatrics, turns that around into Panetta admitting that they got intelligence from waterboarding. Now it is possible that having already experienced waterboarding, the detainees they interrogated were more forthcoming with information, but that begs the question why they weren't more forthcoming earlier.
If Christiane Amanpour wanted to have an intellectually honest discussion of whether torture--and please, give up the "enhanced interrogation techniques" euphemism, it's TORTURE, pure and simple--works, perhaps she should have employed some logic as I have rather than serve up that nice little softball to Liz Cheney, whose only purpose on these shows is to defend her dad's evil and criminal tactics.
AMANPOUR: Liz, does this reignite this debate as to whether these enhanced interrogation techniques work and should be brought back?
CHENEY: I think it does. I think the fact that you clearly have the current CIA director saying that part of the intelligence came from enhanced interrogation, it's important to remember, you know, Chip Burlingame, who was the pilot on American Airlines Flight 77 that flew into the Pentagon, he himself was subjected to these techniques when he went through SERE training.
These are not torture. These are techniques that we know work. That debate is over. It worked. It got the intelligence. It wasn't torture. It was legal.
It seems to me the key question now is, we've got this trove of intelligence, what looks to have been perhaps the biggest trove we've ever been able to get a hold of. If that leads us to other Al Qaida operatives, it's not clear to me that we have any way to effectively interrogate them. We don't have enhanced interrogation anymore. We read people their Miranda rights. We are not detaining people at Guantanamo anymore. We're not detaining people in the secret prison sites. It's not clear to me what the administration will be able to do to get this information.
Shame on ABC News and Christiane Amanpour for not only framing the debate to assume that torture worked, but to then give Liz Cheney a platform to undermine the Obama administration's success where the Bush administration with all their war criminal tactics failed.
