Latest Bulletin from the Ministry of Truth: Sin Makes You Intelligent

For years, we were told stuff like this by the Bushies and their shills for torture in the media:

U.S. and Pakistani authorities captured KSM on March 1, 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. KSM stayed mum for months, often answering questions with Koranic chants. Interrogators eventually waterboarded him — for just 90 seconds.

KSM “didn’t resist,” one CIA veteran said in the August 13 issue of The New Yorker. “He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” Another CIA official told ABC News: “KSM lasted the longest under water-boarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again.”

QED! Torture works!

The claim was reiterated recently:

Today, Library Tower looms 73 stories above Los Angeles. But the Pacific Coast’s highest skyscraper might have become a smoldering pile of steel beams had CIA interrogators not waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) 183 times in March 2003, as recently released memoranda reveal.

Again, the claim is reiterated that waterboarding KSM worked! It foiled the plot to bomb LA. Say what you will, but torturing KSM sure worked!

Only then, Timothy Noah noticed that this is, well, a complete and utter lie. The plot was foiled in 2002. KSM was captured in 2003.

So, turning on a dime, the pro-torture spin machine suddenly announces, “Have we , for all these years, been saying KSM was tortured to foil the bomb plot? Silly us! We meant to say that Abu Zubaydah was, well, we don’t like to say “torture”. We prefer “enhanced interrogation”. But anyway, we got him to sing like a canary on the LA bomb plot! You can absolutely trust us on that. So yes, torture works. After all, have we ever lied to you?”

Hmmm… Well, the WaPo reports something rather at variance with this new narrative from Minitrue:

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Not that torture produced *nothing*, of course. It produced quite a number of baseless fears and wild goose chases upon which we spent our limited resources:

But the decision was made to ‘torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.’ He was ‘waterboarded,’ simulating drowning. Zubaydah babbled about terrorist threats to shopping malls, nuclear power plants, supermarkets, and about al-Qaida plans to build a nuclear device. The administration sounded alerts on every unconfirmed threat. In May 2002, New York City was put on high alert over Zubaydah’s torture-incited ravings that the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty were targets. Cheney went on ‘Larry King Live’ to defend the alerts: ‘We now have a large number of people in custody, detainees, and periodically as we go through this process we learn more about the possibility of future attacks.”

Of course, the torture defender will naturally protest that this information comes from ritually impure sources and so we do not need to listen to it (these would be the same people who tell you that the release of the torture memos was bad because we don’t want to know what the Bush Administation actually authorized. In the immortal words of Peg Noonan, sometimes you have to keep walking. Some things should remain mysterious.)

One way of clearing up this controversy would be to review the tapes the CIA made of Abu Zubaydah’s torture sessions. Then we could discover for ourselves what information he gave during his 83 waterboardings and nail down the claim that tortuing him saved LA. We wouldn’t to get our info from ritually impure sources.

But golly! What do you know! The very people who assure us that torturing KSM Zubaydah saved LA happen to be also the people who destroyed the tapes of the interrogation! What a strange turn of events? What could explain it? A suspicious person might think that people who have been documented to lie repeatedly might be lying still.

But, as torture defenders constantly remind me, it is *so* important to be charitable to torture advocates, especially in the face of massive amounts of common sense. So I guess we’ll just have to go on assuming that torture works. After all, the torturers and their authorizers say so. And what possible interest could they have in lying if it didn’t?