CIA: "Perfect Storm of Ignorance"

If, as many right-wingers and torture apologists claim, the Bush Administration should be excused for torturing prisoners because their techniques were justified in light of 9/11, and/or necessary to secure the intel needed to keep us safe from a second attack, then why didn't anyone research which torture methods would be the most effective in extracting information from captured terrorists and suspects? Wouldn't that have made some perverse sense?

The New York Times today detailed the extraordinary thoughtlessness that went into creating the brutal torture regime after 9/11, with nary a dissenting voice.

This extraordinary consensus was possible...largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

They did not know that our own SERE program (which used the techniques to train our own soliders to withstand torture) had declared waterboarding ineffective. They did no research. This wasn't a one-party brain freeze, either. According to CIA director Porter Goss, Nancy Pelosi didn't ask questions either:

“We were briefed, and we certainly understood what C.I.A. was doing,” Mr. Goss said in an interview. “Not only was there no objection, there was actually concern about whether the agency was doing enough.”

The article quotes a CIA official who called the entire process "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm." No kidding. Read the full article here.