The Ticking Time-Bomb Lie (#23,505 in a series)
Posted on | September 26, 2006
In The Progressive, Alfred McCoy debunks the scenario of the ticking time bomb used to call for the legalization of torture. They’re selling it on television, which seems to be the only place it works. Our Fearful Leader spake thusly unto the multitudes:
In defense of the CIA’s past and future use of this “alternative set of procedures,” Bush told his national television audience a thrilling tale of covert action derring-do almost plucked from the pages of a script for 24. After “they risked their lives to capture some of the most brutal terrorists on Earth,” courageous American agents “worked day and night” to track down “a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden” named Abu Zubaydah. But once in custody, he was “defiant and evasive.” Knowing that “captured terrorists have . . . intelligence that cannot be found any other place,” the CIA, with White House approval, applied that “alternative set of procedures” and thereby extracted timely information that “helped in the planning . . . of the operation that captured Khalid Sheik Mohammed.” Then, “KSM was questioned by the CIA using these procedures,” producing intelligence that stopped a succession of lethal ticking bombs….
As in so many of these ticking-bomb tales, Bush’s supposed successes crumble on closer examination. Just four days later, The New York Time reported that the FBI claimed it got the key information from Abu Zubaydah with its noncoercive methods and that other agencies already had much of his supposedly “vital” intelligence.
It’s not about keeping you safer. It’s about keeping you ignorant, and about keeping them in power.
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