FBI director says no

We have known that the FBI stopped participating with the CIA interrogations when they began using torture. FBI Director since 2001, Robert Mueller was quoted in a Dec. 2008 interview:

Robert Mueller, who was appointed by Bush in 2001 and remains FBI director under Obama, delivered that assessment at the end of this December 2008 article in Vanity Fair on torture:

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

And there was Mary Cheney on TV today defending her father's assertions that very useful information was obtained. Mary also trotted out that silly claim that, because our troops are waterboarded as part of their resistance training, it can't be so bad.

Here's the sticking point, Mary. If they do in fact do the same thing to our troops that they do to prisoners (which I contend they don't; it's not the same -- but she's claiming it is), then how in hell do you suppose it makes prisoners talk?

If it's not too bad to do to our troops, then how does it work on hardened Al Kaeda fighters? Could it be the difference in a few seconds of water-pouring by your own people to show you what's it's like -- and 183 rounds of it for up to 40 seconds done by brutal interrogators who have you completely in their power?

I think you really just can't put those two things together and make it work. But the genuises who ran things for the last 8 years can't seem to figure that out. Or else they think we're stupid and gullible.

Ralph