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So why did they not do anything to forestall or minimize the damage from this imminent threat?
They did nothing because obtaining intelligence is not the nub of the question. Torturing people and rendering them to other countries so that the US can deny that it tortured them are not designed to extract useful intelligence. Torture-extracted information is information given under pain of death by victims who want the pain to stop and will tell the torturer what they think the torturer wants to hear. Abu Zubaydah, one of the three detainees that NSA Chief Michael Hayden has admitted were waterboarded, was and is mentally ill and sent US interrogators chasing after ghosts from his “confessions” under torture.
The "ticking time bomb" scenario allegedly necessitating the use of torture is a false premise for multiple reasons. I won’t go into all of them here. Let the following suffice for now. Any scoundrel could cite an alleged "ticking time bomb" as a justification at any time. Is this the kind of world that we want to live in where anyone has license, as long as he or she cites the suspicion that there's a bomb about to go off, to torture someone? This is why international law makes crystal clear that torture is at all times and under all circumstances unjust, immoral, illegal and barbaric.
The “ticking time bomb” scenario rests upon a specific kind of immoral arithmetic: other people’s lives aren’t as important as our lives. Or to be more specific, American lives are more valuable than non-Americans’ lives. A particularly telling example of this comes from Michael Ignatieff.
Ignatieff is Director of Harvard’s Carr Center of Human Rights Policy. A liberal hawk, he endorsed the invasion of Iraq and wrote in the January 5, 2003 New York Times Magazine an essay tellingly entitled: “The American Empire (Get Used to It).” On May 2, 2004, in an essay entitled "Lesser Evils," echoing Dick Cheney, he stated:
"To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war. These are evils because each strays from national and international law and because they kill people or deprive them of freedom without due process. They can be justified only because they prevent the greater evil."
As I wrote in my book, “Ignatieff’s ‘greater evil,’ he explains, is a second terrorist attack on the US. According to his logic, then, the killing of more than 100,000 Iraqis [now at over 1.2 million and counting] due to our invasion and occupation, in addition to the ongoing 'coercive interrogations' of Iraqis and others, are the 'lesser evil.' This must mean that the greater evil was when Saddam tortured and killed Iraqis but when Americans torture and kill Iraqis it’s the lesser evil. I’m glad we got that straight.” (p. 99)
The fact that Iraq had nothing to do whatsoever with 9/11 does not even enter into Michael - Mr. Human Rights – Ignatieff’s calculations.
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Obama, we should note, endorses the “war on terror” on the explicit basis that American lives are more important than others’ and that the American Empire must continue to exist and dominate the rest of the world. This worldview led Obama as a US Senator to allow the Military Commissions Act of 2006, “legalizing” torture and stripping habeas corpus rights from “unlawful enemy combatants,” to pass without filibustering it or pointing out its immoral logic. It may well lead him to fulfill some portion or more of Mr. Gerecht’s prediction.
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Mark Danner in his book, Torture and Truth, cites a French Colonel's comment on Algeria to underscore the point that if you accept the "rightness" of occupation and imperial dominance, then you also accept the actions that must per force follow from that:
“Should we remain in Algeria? If you answer 'yes,' then you must accept all the necessary consequences."
—Colonel Philippe Mathieu, The Battle of Algiers (1965)
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