In the run up to the Iraq War, a great deal of deference was given by the mainstream press to claims made by Bush administration officials, who assured reporters that they were privy to intelligence information that the press wasn't. The press took these claims at face value, rarely questioned them, and in hindsight things that were "certain" were in fact based on a kind of assumption of what was really unknown. We didn't know what information the administration had, but we assumed that it said Iraq had WMDs because that's what they were telling us.
Dick Cheney basically pulled that trick again over the past eight months. His torture tour has been premised on the assumption that there was some sort of holy grail of CIA documents that proved, definitively, that stuffing people into boxes, slamming them against walls, waterboarding them, (and as was revealed yesterday) implying that their female relatives would be raped in front of them, threatening to murder their children, I could go on--led to information that saved the nation from attack. Again, many reporters took the claims at face value, because it was impossible to know what the classified information said. Those documents were released yesterday--and they simply don't do what Cheney said they would.
As Spencer Ackerman writes, the 2004 document,"Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the war Against Al Qaeda" amounts to the kind of laundry list of anti-terror accomplishments one might find at The Corner, and has a similar fidelity to detail. It simply fails to distinguish between "detainee reporting" information taken from detainees as a whole, and information gleaned from "enhanced interrogation techniques." Marcy Wheeler points out that the 2005 document, "Khalid Sheik Mohammed: Preeminent Source on Al Qaeda", contradicts the 2004 IG report in its assertions about the utility of the information KSM gave up under torture. In other words, while the 2004 inspector general's report simply asserts that the EITs provided information that helped national security, neither of the documents Cheney wanted actually prove that torture "worked" in the kind of straightforward, unequivocal way that Cheney said they did.
So really, how many more times are we going to fall for this same trick, where government officials pretend to be privy to "special information" to make an assertion that can't be objectively evaluated, only to find out that official was simply not telling the truth months later?
-- A. Serwer
