"The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means"
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A bureaucrat’s scalpel disguised as a moral verdict. Dennis C. Blair doesn’t thunder about right and wrong; he audits. By calling the information “valuable in some instances,” he concedes the one claim defenders of harsh interrogation techniques most want on the record: it sometimes “worked.” Then he pulls the floor out from under the argument with a single institutional nightmare: “there is no way of knowing.”
That phrase is doing all the heavy lifting. It doesn’t accuse; it disqualifies. Intelligence work lives and dies on uncertainty, but policy justification demands a cleaner chain of causation than the real world can supply. Blair is pointing at a methodological void: you can’t run the counterfactual experiment. You can’t rewind history and test whether lawful interrogation, surveillance, informants, or simple patience would have produced the same lead. Without that comparison, “it worked” becomes less evidence than story.
The subtext is also legal and political triage. In the post-9/11 debates over “enhanced interrogation,” the public was offered a bargain: compromised ethics in exchange for security. Blair’s line refuses the bargain by attacking its price tag, not its morality. If you can’t prove exclusivity, you can’t justify exceptionalism.
It’s the language of a public servant trying to steer a national argument out of the arena of vengeance and into the colder realm of standards: burden of proof, traceable outcomes, repeatable methods. In that chill, the techniques don’t just look brutal; they look unnecessary, and unnecessary is often the most damning category in government.
That phrase is doing all the heavy lifting. It doesn’t accuse; it disqualifies. Intelligence work lives and dies on uncertainty, but policy justification demands a cleaner chain of causation than the real world can supply. Blair is pointing at a methodological void: you can’t run the counterfactual experiment. You can’t rewind history and test whether lawful interrogation, surveillance, informants, or simple patience would have produced the same lead. Without that comparison, “it worked” becomes less evidence than story.
The subtext is also legal and political triage. In the post-9/11 debates over “enhanced interrogation,” the public was offered a bargain: compromised ethics in exchange for security. Blair’s line refuses the bargain by attacking its price tag, not its morality. If you can’t prove exclusivity, you can’t justify exceptionalism.
It’s the language of a public servant trying to steer a national argument out of the arena of vengeance and into the colder realm of standards: burden of proof, traceable outcomes, repeatable methods. In that chill, the techniques don’t just look brutal; they look unnecessary, and unnecessary is often the most damning category in government.
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| Topic | Knowledge |
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