I don’t know much about national security beyond what is in the media. I’m probably naive on how useful secret and not so secret wars and off-the-grid prisons are to our safety. Just musing here. But my understanding is, when people say ‘torture doesn’t work,’ they don’t mean the victims won’t give info. They mean the victims give too much info, any info, to avoid more torture. The common anecdote is the ticking bomb scenario, where a bad guy in custody knows the location of an armed bomb that’s going to go off and kill a bunch of people. Surely if nothing else worked and time is short, torture might have to be used. Why can’t you bleeding heart libtards grasp this …?

Here’s some of what the newly released, declassified version of the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report had to say:

HuffPo — The newly released document tears apart the CIA’s past claims that only a small number of detainees were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques. The agency has said it held fewer than 100 detainees and subjected fewer than one-third of those to controversial tactics such as waterboarding. But Senate investigators found that the CIA had actually kept 119 detainees in custody, 26 of whom were illegally held. And despite CIA insistence that the program was limited in scope, Senate investigators conclude that the use of torture was much more widespread than previously thought.

The study reveals several gruesome instances of torture by mid-level CIA officers who participated in the program, including threats of sexual violence using a broomstick and the use of “rectal hydration” in instances of harsh interrogations that lasted for days or weeks on end. And, contrary to the agency’s prior insistence that only three detainees were subject to waterboarding, the Senate report suggests it was likely used on more detainees.

On the ticking bomb, maybe torture would work in that narrow hypothetical scenario. The problem is most detainees don’t know about any ticking bombs, some could be completely innocent, in the wrong place at the right time, or turned in for profit by a rival warlord in some ungoverned battlefield shithole. But if goons start pulling out finger nails and sticking live wires into wounds, demanding the whereabouts of ‘The Bomb’ of dozens of suspects, I bet everyone of them will offer up detailed ticking bomb scenarios. All of which will have to be checked out, or should be, requiring huge amounts of manpower, to conclude — guess what? — they were frantically trying to come up with anything they could think of to avoid more torture.

“The committee reviewed 20 of the most frequent and prominent examples of purported counterterrorism ‘successes’ that the CIA has attributed to the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the intelligence panel, said in a statement Tuesday. “Each of those examples was found to be wrong in fundamental respects.”

In some instances, the study finds, the information acquired proved irrelevant to stopping terror threats. In others, the use of the techniques resulted in detainees providing fabricated or inaccurate information, and in still other cases, the information obtained through interrogating the detainees had already been acquired through other techniques.

It’s common sense: people do not by and large, bravely hold up under torture. If used as a policy on dozens or hundreds or thousands of prisoners, what you get are reams and reams of claims about plots and conspiracies, but very little progress if any is actually made, because you’ve just created a giant pool of confusing, conflicting misinformation and spoon-fed it to yourself. You can read about this dilemma going back thousands of years, it’s not new. Even in more barbaric times and places, there are kings, popes, and tyrants of all kinds who came to understand the limits.

This isn’t purely academic either. There are concerns WH sanctioned torture produced false claims of high level links between Iraq and bin Laden. Links then pushed by the Bush-Cheney WH to stampede a terrified nation into what quickly devolved into a 10 year trillion-dollar wild goose chase for non existent weapons programs. Because we couldn’t afford to wait for the ‘smoking gun’ that could come in the form of a ‘mushroom cloud’. A brilliant line to scare the living shit out of the Cold War generation. Maybe Bush and Cheney even believed it, thanks in part to torture.

The release of this report has created some truly bizarre claims on social media under the trending hashtags #TortureReport and #TortureTuesday. From the left and the right and the middle. A couple of the better more accurate observations made today imo: My friend Mark Sumner tweeted, “The biggest mistake we made after 9/11 is confusing cruelty for determination and violence for bravery. We’re still making that mistake.” FTB co-founder Ed Brayton posted on Facebook that it was evident from the moment Obama took office that no one was going to be held accountable for torture during the Bush years. I’ll add that to some extent, a lot of us have to accept some responsibility. I was so angry in the weeks following 9-11 that I probably would have cheered it on had the same reports come to light then.

Then there’s the moral argument: a lot of the torture that happened back in the day seems to have come from general hatred of the enemy and for good old fashioned fun. Too often one can find justifications that this is what “God commands”. What’s disturbing is a lot of the support for it today, from home and abroad, sounds like it comes from the same dark corner of the human psyche. Anyone who really wants to unleash those age-old demons is playing with fire. We choose not to use chemical weapons regardless of immediate need, we avoid burning entire cities to the ground without a thought like Caesar, we don’t execute POWs and aid workers on Youtube and sell surviving teenage women to the highest bidder like ISIS, we choose not to do those things, even when we’re pissed off beyond words, even when we’re desperate and hoping they might save US lives. Let’s put torture on that list and keep it there.