Greg Miller reports in today’s Los Angeles Times that, for all the time and effort the CIA spent asking the OLC for legal cover to carry out new and/or escalated forms of torture, almost no effort was made to inquire into whether the techniques being used were actually effective (emphasis mine):

“Nobody with expertise or experience in interrogation ever took a rigorous, systematic review of the various techniques — enhanced or otherwise — to see what resulted in the best information,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official involved in overseeing the interrogation program.

As a result, there was never a determination of “what you could do without the use of enhanced techniques,” said the official, who like others described internal discussions on condition of anonymity.

Former Bush administration officials said the failure to conduct such an examination was part of a broader reluctance to reassess decisions made shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Defense Department, Justice Department and CIA “all insisted on sticking with their original policies and were not open to revisiting them, even as the damage of these policies became apparent,” said John B. Bellinger III, who was legal advisor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, referring to burgeoning international outrage.
[…]
The limited resources spent examining whether the interrogation measures worked were in stark contrast to the energy the CIA devoted to collecting memos declaring the program legal.

Justice Department memos released this month show that the CIA repeatedly sought new opinions on the legality of depriving prisoners of sleep for up to seven days, throwing them against walls, forcing them into tiny boxes and subjecting them to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.

Whether those methods worked is facing independent scrutiny for the first time only now, three months after President Obama banned the CIA from using them.

As part of an executive order shutting down the CIA’s secret prisons, the White House has set up a task force to examine the effectiveness of various interrogation approaches.

The Senate Intelligence Committee launched a similar review, and began combing through classified CIA cables that describe daily developments in the agency’s interrogations of prisoners suspected of ties to Al Qaeda.

“To the best of our knowledge, such a review has not been done before,” said a Senate aide involved in the investigation.

But here is the money quote — the one that truly makes me want to start smashing things (emphasis mine):

A U.S. intelligence official who defended CIA interrogation practices said that “productivity was an obvious and important measure of the program’s effectiveness. The techniques themselves were not designed to elicit specific pieces of information, but to condition hardened terrorists to answer questions about Al Qaeda’s plans and intentions.

“By that yardstick — the generation of reporting that was true and useful, that led even to other captures — it worked,” the official said.

Say WHAT?!

Kathy Kattenburg

PAST CONTRIBUTOR.