No FOX News, torture didn't help us

Last week, I wrote about how FOX News has been defending torture and dismissing waterboarding as not torture.

Bill O'Reilly had Ellis Henican of Newsday on his show and stated:

I would have done exactly what Bush did. Exactly. I would have dumped that guy in the water 1000 times to save your life. You.

The thing is...it wouldn't have saved Henican's life. Because it didn't save anyone's life.

The CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to recently declassified Justice Department memos.

Yep. Even back in 2004, the CIA inspector general claimed there was no proof that waterboarding helped stop any impending attacks. None.

Did that fact stop the Bush administration from torturing people? Hell no.

Did that fact stop the Bush administration from following up on false information garnered via torture? Hell no.

As one former intelligence official admitted:

We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms

Wait. You might point out that in 2004, the CIA inspector general simply noted that torture didn't stop any impending attacks. He didn't say that torture brought forth false information.

That is true.

It was in 2002 when Bush was warned about the fact that torture brings forth false information.

The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."

Furthermore, the Bush administration was warned that using torture could have extremely bad repercussions for Americans.

"The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel," says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency.

But they continued doing it any way.

Even FBI Director Robert Mueller has admitted that he doesn't believe torture defended us.

Last December, FBI Director Robert Mueller told Vanity Fair magazine that he didn't believe that intelligence gleaned from abusive interrogation techniques had disrupted any attacks on America.

In an article written by 2009 Orwell Prize winning journalist Patrick Cockburn for The Independent, a member of the U.S. military who conducted 300 interrogations spoke about the effect of torture:

"The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.

Major Alexander's attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. "It plays into the hands of al-Qa'ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights," he says. An eloquent and highly intelligent man with experience as a criminal investigator within the US military, he says that torture is ineffective, as well as counter-productive. "People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop," he says. "They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped."

Torture actual drove more people into the arms of al-Qaida which caused the deaths of numerous American soldiers.

So basically, actual intelligent professionals in the FBI, CIA, and military believe torture didn't help. FOX News believes it did.

Who would you believe?