For years, we were told stuff like this <\/a>by the Bushies and their shills for torture in the media:<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 for just 90 seconds.<\/p>\n KSM \u201cdidn\u2019t resist,\u201d one CIA veteran said in the August 13 issue of The New Yorker. \u201cHe sang right away. He cracked real quick.\u201d Another CIA official told ABC News: \u201cKSM lasted the longest under water-boarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n QED! Torture works!<\/p>\n The claim was reiterated recently:<\/a><\/p>\n Today, Library Tower looms 73 stories above Los Angeles. But the Pacific Coast\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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!<\/p>\n Only then, Timothy Noah noticed that this is, well, a complete and utter lie<\/a>. The plot was foiled in 2002. KSM was captured in 2003.<\/p>\n So, turning on a dime, the pro-torture spin machine suddenly announces, \u201cHave 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\u2019t like to say \u201ctorture\u201d. We prefer \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d. 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?\u201d<\/p>\n Hmmm\u2026 Well, the WaPo<\/a> reports something rather at variance with this new narrative from Minitrue:<\/p>\n In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida\u2019s tortured confessions<\/strong>, 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 \u2014 chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates \u2014 was obtained before waterboarding was introduced<\/strong>, they said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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<\/a>:<\/p>\n But the decision was made to \u2018torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.\u2019 He was \u2018waterboarded,\u2019 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\u2019s torture-incited ravings that the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty were targets. Cheney went on \u2018Larry King Live\u2019 to defend the alerts: \u2018We 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\n One way of clearing up this controversy would be to review the tapes the CIA made of Abu Zubaydah\u2019s 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\u2019t to get our info from ritually impure sources. <\/p>\n But golly! What do you know! The very people who assure us that torturing 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\u2019ll 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\u2019t?<\/p>\nKSM<\/s> Zubaydah saved LA happen to be also the people who destroyed the tapes of the interrogation<\/a>! 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.<\/p>\n