After enduring the CIA’s harshest interrogation methods and spending more than a year in the agency’s secret prisons, Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called “terrorist tutorials.”…
Speaking in English, Mohammed “seemed to relish the opportunity, sometimes for hours on end, to discuss the inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group’s plans, ideology and operatives,” said one of two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified. “He’d even use a chalkboard at times.”
Read the entire article. It proves that KSM would never have spoken to his interrogators if he hadn’t been subjected to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.
Torture isn’t ‘good.’ Sure, but what if it saves thousands of lives? What if torturing one man helps the government safe ten lives?
Additionally, anti-torture extremists have to be aware of the fact that one prisoner isn’t the other. CIA agents say, for instance, that many Islamic terrorists believe they can cooperate at a certain moment without feeling guilty about it. As one of those agents explained: “Once the harsher techniques were used on [detainees], they could be viewed as having done their duty to Islam or their cause, and their religious principles would ask no more of them. After that point, they became compliant. Obviously, there was also an interest in being able to later say, ‘I was tortured into cooperating’.”
Which leads us to the following conclusion: the debate about torture isn’t as black and white as the anti-torture extremists would like us to believe.
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