Rep. King Defends Torture By Citing Intelligence Official Who Opposes Torture
While Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has said the use of torture produced usable information "in some circumstances," he also maintains that the damage it caused "far outweighed" any benefit.
Appearing on Fox & Friends this morning, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) attacked President Obama for suggesting that torture does not work. Following Dick Cheney's lead, King cited comments by Director of Intelligence Dennis Blair to defend the use of torture. "I thought it was factually inaccurate for him to say those tactics did not work, when in fact, every CIA director including his own Director of National Intelligence says they did work," King said. However, while DNI Blair has said that torture produced usable intelligence "in some circumstances," he also maintains that it is "not essential to our national security":
[T]he damage to the country's image caused by the use of waterboarding and similar techniques exceeded any potential benefit, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said.
"The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances," he said in a statement yesterday, "but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means." [...]
"The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world," Blair said in the statement. "The damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."
King also used Wednesday's terror bust in New York City as an opportunity to fear monger against holding Guantanamo detainees in U.S. prisons:
There's a real problem in the prisons of Islamic radicalization...It's no coincidence that all of the ones [on Wednesday] -- you know, all of them were converts, and they were converted in prison...To add to that Guantanamo detainees would make the situation much worse.
Of course, King's anti-Muslim scare tactics are nothing new. In response to the recent DHS report on rightwing extremism, King made the nonsensical complaint that there hadn't been a report "talking about look out for mosques." He's also endorsed ethnic profiling targeting people of "Middle Eastern and South Asian" descent, and he even wrote a novel fantasizing about Islamic fundamentalists launching a terror attack on U.S. soil.
