Today’s New York Times has an article blasting the Bush Administration for its interrogation policies - saying that they are outdated and ineffective.
“As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.
….
While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods - possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda - are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices.”
Actually, Andrew Sullivan convincingly documents that the techniques and justifications for the Bush Administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” are actually Nazi interrogation methods judged to be war crimes.
“What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture - ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.”
So, in sum, the Bush Administration has used interrogation methods that fail to gather information well - but succeed in replicating Nazi war crimes against humanity. I don’t think that I can make it much clearer.
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