Torture and False Information

Fascinating story in the New Yorker pinning a big share of the CIA's most brutal and idiotic acts on a single agent, one of the leaders of the counter-intelligence branch. Among other things she personally oversaw the torture of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad:

According to the Senate report, she sent a bubbly cable back to C.I.A. headquarters in 2003, anticipating the pain they planned to inflict on K.S.M. in an attempt to get him to confirm a report from another detainee, about a plot to use African-American Muslims training in Afghanistan for future terrorist attacks. “i love the Black American Muslim at AQ camps in Afghanuistan (sic). … Mukie (K.S.M.) is going to be hatin’ life on this one,” she wrote, according to the report. But, as NBC notes, she misconstrued the intelligence gathered from the other detainee. Somehow, the C.I.A. mistakenly believed that African-American Muslim terrorists were already in the United States. The intelligence officials evidently pressed K.S.M. so hard to confirm this, under such physical duress, that he eventually did, even though it was false—leading U.S. officials on a wild-goose chase for black Muslim Al Qaeda operatives in Montana.

Behold how torture actually works. When you torture people, they will tell you what they think you want to hear. Thus all your misconceptions are confirmed, and the truth remains farther away than before you started.

According to NBC and the New Yorker, this woman (if it is a woman) is still a top figure in the CIA. Sickening.