Matt Yglesias suggests that the supposed use of torture for intelligence is really the use of torture the same way the Soviets used it, i.e. to get people to say what the Bush administration want to hear in order to justify what it wants to do.
He also links to this article by Laura Rozen, which talks about how confimation bias may have been a major factor in the intelligence distortions regarding Saddam.
The Rozen article includes this little nugget:
The imprisonment-by-assumption thesis [i.e. that we made the assumption of Saddam's WMDs unfalsifiable] might also explain another mystery historians will have to sort out: how the neocons managed to convince themselves and many others that controlling post-Saddam Iraq would be a cakewalk because virtually all Iraqis would welcome invading G.I.s as liberators. Talk about mirror-imaging!
Of course, the neo-cons would have us believe still that we are seen as liberators, that's why there is the emphasis on foreign fighters. It's only those dirty Syrians and Iranians who are fighting us!
As Gray Brecher says:
Beyond that, Bush policy is to blame Iran, or Syria, or Satan or whoever.
Iran? Maybe. Syria? No way. Syria's scared to death, ready to do anything to make Uncle Sam happy. And if it is Iran, what can we do about it? There are still a few neocons so totally out of their little gourds they want us to invade Iran. I have to wonder if they're agents of Dr Evil, programmed to destroy America. Because invading Iran would do it, it'd end us once and for all.
This blame stuff is a sign of frustration. .
That is all.
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