Would it have been wrong for the CIA to treat Mohammed Atta this way? I don't offer that as an excuse, necessarily, but just to provide some complicating perspective that your post lacks. IOW, there's a war on, you know.
And your intra-CIA disconnect is interesting. It must be hard for the left to champion CIA opposition to Bush & Iraq on the one hand (those would be the smart ones) and then see this hit the papers.
To paraphrase Harlan Ellison's "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman...
"There's a war on...
but wasn't there always?"
If you suspend every aspect of civil liberties for the convenience of the government in a war with no criteria for victory, what incentive is there for the government to ever declare that war actually over?
What you describe isn't a "complicating factor", but a transparent justification, and a meaningless one. You're far more likely to create a Qutb than you are to catch an Atta, so the possibility of the latter does not override the problem of the former.
Besides, torture doesn't elicit useful information in the first place. Just ask John McCain.
(As for the inter-CIA division... the Ops section and the Analysis section are different organizations with different organizational cultures.)
Commenting by HaloScan
