Reply #28: The Bush book tour

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demonstrates the media's unwillingness to question the torture narrative. Bush keeps claiming torture was an effective last resort. Why on earth should we believe him?

We have FBI agent Ali Soufan on record stating that legal interrogation methods were getting results.

Here is CIA agent John Kiriakou on torture from his book:

What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple of counts. I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-give seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence. I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time. Now, we know that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied. In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the arts of deception even among its own.

One of Zubaydah's lawyers challenges the notion that Zubaydah was even associated with al Qaeda:

For many years, Abu Zubaydah's name has been synonymous with the war on terror because of repeated false statements made by the Bush administration, the majority of which were known to be false when uttered. On 17 April 2002, <...> President Bush publicly announced that Zayn had been captured: "We recently apprehended one of al-Qaida's top leaders, a man named Abu Zubaydah. He was spending a lot of time as one of the top operating officials of al-Qaida, plotting and planning murder."

Zayn's capture and imprisonment were touted as a great achievement in the fight against terrorism and al-Qaida. There was just one minor problem: the man described by President Bush and others within his administration as a "top operative", the "number three person" in al-Qaida, and al-Qaida's "chief of operations" was never even a member of al-Qaida, much less an individual who was among its "inner circle". The Bush administration had made another mistake.

The truth about Abu Zubaydah by defense counsel Brent Mickum

The US public has been sold on the notion of a good faith torture program. Has there ever been a good faith torture program?