KVUE - Analysis: Will Torture Report Ultimately Harm or Help?

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By Mark Wiggins

In the popular Showtime original series "Homeland," a scene in the first season episode "Blind Spot" depicts a terrorist undergoing enhanced interrogation tactics at the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency. The prisoner is stripped and left in a cold room, where he's deprived of sleep by deafening blasts of heavy metal music.

"I think it's a very good depiction of some of the enhanced interrogation tactics that have been used," said Fred Burton, Vice President for Intelligence at Austin-based geopolitical intelligence firm Stratfor.

A former counterterrorism investigator with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service, Burton has investigated everything from Cold War assassinations to the first World Trade Center Bombing in 1993. Burton recalls visits during his federal service to a number of foreign detention facilities where extreme interrogations were conducted.

"Most people will tell you anything when they incur pain, and I don't think that they're very successful," Burton told KVUE. "It's never been my experience that they've actually worked."

It's the same conclusion reached by the so-called "torture report" released by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). The 525 page summary made public Tuesday gruesomely details interrogations conducted by the CIA on terrorists captured after the September 11 attacks.

The report graphically describes waterboardings, extensive sleep deprivation, beatings and and exposure to hypothermia that may have resulted in at least one death. It accuses the CIA of downplaying the severity of interrogations, actively impeding White House oversight, avoiding investigators and misleading the U.S. Department of Justice.

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Introducing the report, Sen. Feinstein defended her decision to make the information public by noting "this clearly is a period of turmoil and instability in many parts of the world. Unfortunately, that's going to continue for the foreseeable future, whether this report is released or not."

"I think Americans have a right to know when their government engages in brutality," Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX 35) told KVUE Tuesday. "What we learned is that torture does not work. It failed, and our country is really left less safe when our values are debased and when our unassailable position on justice and human rights is brought into question."

"What endangers Americans is not the truth, but the wrongdoing that occurred here," said Doggett, who calls the CIA's actions "a bureaucracy run amok" with neither accountability nor restraint. While allowing some of those involved may have been motivated by the desire to fight terrorism, Doggett argues such activity makes it more difficult for those abroad to separate America from her enemies. His disappointment is not limited to the Bush administration.

"I think there should have been some criminal prosecutions," Doggett said. "Certainly there needs to be accountability within the agency, and I disagree with the current administration that did not raise these issues of wrongdoing when they entered office -- even though it was widely known -- and who seemed to have devoted more effort to redacting and removing certain critical pieces of information from this report and suppressing whistleblowers than demanding that accountability."

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