The CIA, The White House, And Waterboarding

CIA Tactics Endorsed In Secret Memos -- Washington Post

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency's interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

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My Comments: Anyone familiar with military history and the history of conflicts knows that torture works .... but my concern is not the torture .... my concern is that the intelligence is not good enough in targeting the right men to be captured and interrogated. The biggest failure of U.S. war strategy since 9/11 has been the complete failure of its Intelligence Services in assessing threats and stopping them. Has the NSA and CIA improvedsince 9/11 .... I would like to think so, but only time will tell us how accurate this assessment is.