torture, ad nauseum

The New York Times headline says it all:
In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use

At the risk of being unbearably repetitive, the article goes to the heart of the issue, and shows what defenders of the CIA and 'harsh interrogation tactics' are missing. The CIA complains, "they're letting the enemy know what techniques we might use" and supporters indignantly ask "doesn't the mastermind of 9/11 deserve this kind of harsh treatment?"

Well, forget the moral quandaries of using techniques that, more than likely, result in extreme, permanent physical damage or even death. Whether prisoners in custody are 'deserving' of extreme techniques is completely irrelevant. Tipping terrorists off to these techniques is equivalently unimportant. Why? Because they don't work, of course. Morality is one issue, of possible debate, I suppose. But efficacy simply is not. And as the Times clearly delineates, no one implementing these techniques bothered to investigate their efficacy:

Overwhelmed with reports of potential threats and anguished that the agency had failed to stop the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet and his top aides did not probe deeply into the prescription Dr. Mitchell so confidently presented: using the SERE tactics on Qaeda prisoners.

A little research on the origin of those methods would have given reason for doubt. Government studies in the 1950s found that Chinese Communist interrogators had produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister “brainwashing” but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene.

“The Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture,’ ” one 1956 study concluded. “But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”

Worse, the study found that under such abusive treatment, a prisoner became “malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate.”

In late 2001, about a half-dozen SERE trainers, according to a report released Tuesday night by the Senate Armed Services Committee, began raising stark warning about plans by both the military and the C.I.A. to use the SERE methods in interrogations.

In December 2001, Lt. Col. Daniel J. Baumgartner of the Air Force, who oversaw SERE training, cautioned in one memo that physical pressure was “less reliable” than other interrogation methods, could backfire by increasing a prisoner’s resistance and would have an “intolerable public and political backlash when discovered.” But his memo went to the Defense Department, not the C.I.A.

Remember (again) that, in the midst of this firestorm about interrogation techniques, we still haven't heard about a single actionable piece of information that resulted from these interrogations. Most likely because such information was simply never obtained:

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions.

Look. Obama is no saint. His decision on Bagram reeks of Bush administration rationalization. He's depressingly willing to compromise habeas corpus when it comes to overseas prisoners. What we know about him is that he's relentlessly pragmatic. So to me, this decision is more about high-yield pragmatism than moral grandstanding. Eliminate a poorly-researched, highly unpopular, ineffective set of techniques, and improve America's perception globally at the same time. So...am I just taking crazy pills or something?