Greenwald: bin Laden’s capture does not prove torture advocates right

Osama bin Laden

Glenn Greenwald has a typically great piece up where he notes the predictable clamor from conservatives claiming that Osama bin Laden’s capture (and death) was only made possible thanks to the Bush-era torture techniques, a notion that’s not only been debunked my multiple sources, but that manages to miss the point as pro-torture advocates usually do: It wouldn’t matter if torture had worked in this specific instance, or any other, because A) it’s inhumane, B) it’s illegal, and C) it’s much less effective and reliable than other, non-invasive interrogation methods, as multitudes of trained interrogators have concluded.

Here’s the opening quote, if only to entice you to read further:

The killing of Osama bin Laden has, as The New York Times notes, reignited the debate over "brutal interrogations" -- by which it's meant that Republicans are now attempting to exploit the emotions generated by the killing to retroactively justify the torture regime they implemented. The factual assertions on which this attempt is based -- that waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation methods" produced evidence crucial to locating bin Laden -- are dubious in the extreme, for reasons Andrew Sullivan and Marcy Wheeler document. So fictitious are these claims that even Donald Rumsfeld has repudiated them.

Be sure to read the rest.