AlterNet has posted a transcript of Amy Goodman's Democracy Now interview with former 9-11 Commission Chief Philip Zelikow. That interview discusses the 9-11 Commissions role in requesting information that led to the use of torture during CIA interrogations. Reports indicate that a quarter of the evidence cited in the 9-11 Commission's report was obtained by interrogations involving the use of torture techniques. Here's a quote from one of the participants in the interview:
Goodman: Michael Ratner, you're the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Your response?
Michael Ratner: You know, when Robert called me to talk about this story and what he had found, essentially the key chapters being based substantially on evidence from torture, I actually was really shocked by it. I mean, I didn't know that. I work in this field, and I didn't know that. And I was shocked by it because we all know that our own court cases have said evidence from torture is not reliable. And here you have a report that's supposed to tell us what actually happened in its key chapters on the planning of 9/11, what actually happened when the people came into the country, and you look at those footnotes, and they're based on torture. What it has to tell you is to be very, very skeptical about a number of the conclusions in that report. You just can't rely on evidence of torture. We all know that. Think about it. If the Bhutto assassination -- if the government of Pakistan issued a report, and we knew it came out of torture, would any of us be sitting at this table believing it? Would we believe that about the assassination of Kennedy, if it came out of tortured people? No, we wouldn't. Why are we accepting this? That's not saying it's not true, but it's saying we have a big problem here now, because we have evidence of torture.
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