Torture advocates watch one of their favorite arguments fall by the wayside.Raw Story:
Unless you're a fan of willful ignorance, you know all about the four Bush administration torture memos released Thursday by the Justice Department. Those memos revealed Bush lawyers authorized the use of insects in interrogations, among other shocking and disturbing strategies for getting detainees to talk.
But perhaps more shocking than these newly revealed torture methods is a memo's reference to the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (still in U.S. custody) was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah (the man who allegedly fears insects) was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.
This insane frequency would seem to make (even more) self-evident the fact that waterboarding is not an effective anti-terror tool. Putting aside the moral and legal outrages for a moment, these statistics do not show waterboarding to be the ace in the hole "enhanced" technique Bush et al. claimed it was. Quite the opposite.
Since it took an entire month of torture to get what the torturers wanted, the "ticking timebomb scenario" quietly dies. That is, unless you can come up with some reasonable explanation as to why a terrorist would set the timer on his bomb for 744 hours. Otherwise, a month is way too long for Jack Bauer to get the intel through waterboarding and save the day.
Wow. It turns out that the stuff you see on the teevee really is bullshit and has no relationship with reality, just like your parents always told you. For the record, you can't cure amnesia by hitting someone on the head with a wooden mallet, either.
