Former CIA station chief challenges claims that torture thwarted terror attacks

Former CIA station chief challenges claims that torture thwarted terror attacks:

"Larisa Alexandrovna
Raw Story
Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Two current CIA officers agree

Milton Bearden, a former Central Intelligence Agency Pakistan station chief who served at the agency for three decades, says claims that the Bush administration’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques saved American lives are likely false.

The retired senior CIA officer also says that the former administration’s repeated assertions that attacks were foiled through torture are hurting US credibility abroad, endangering alliances and aiding the cause of would-be terrorists.

Bearden, who formerly headed the CIA’s Soviet/East European Division and served as station chief in Pakistan, Nigeria and Sudan, was a key figure in the funding and training of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. He retired in 1994 but says he has communicated with contacts who agree they’ve heard of no evidence to support Bush officials’ claims.

If the Bush administration had proof of a plot stopped by enhanced interrogation, they would have produced it, Bearden says. “I
cannot imagine that the system would not have leaked such a story,” he insists. “It would have been leaked in a New York minute.”

Former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney publicly defended their harsh interrogation approach last month.

However, the techniques approved by Bush administration lawyers in 2002 appear to be prohibited by both the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention against Torture, to which the US is a signatory."