Yesterday's AEI panel consisting mostly of former Bush administration officials supportive of torture provided an opportunity for torture defenders to reinforce their unsubstantiated claims about so-called enhanced interrogation playing a large role in locating Osama bin Laden. Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen tried to have it both ways, arguing that waterboarding wasn’t torture but that coercion was necessary to get hardened detainees to talk. To illustrate his point, he claimed that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed "mocked his CIA interrogators during his March 2003 waterboarding sessions by using his fingers to tick off the number of seconds he would be subjected to near drowning.”
"He was communicating to his interrogators that he was on to them," Marc Thiessen said during a panel discussion on what role harsh interrogation tactics might have played in developing the intelligence that led to Osama bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Thiessen means this anecdote to prove that waterboarding doesn't rise to the level of torture. In fact it really calls into question its supposed effectiveness -- if KSM was so resistant to the technique, what exactly, was the point of waterboarding him in the first place? Waterboarding can't both be necessary to crack hardened terrorists and so easy to resist that KSM mocked his interrogators at the same time. The logic of this anecdote is that the U.S. should be adopting more brutal methods of interrogation, because the ones Thiessen spends so much time defending aren't harsh enough to force cooperation.
As CIA Director Leon Panetta implied in the letter posted by Greg Sargent yesterday, KSM lied about the importance of the courier who eventually led intelligence analysts to bin Laden’s location, saying that “[t]hese attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier’s role were alerting.” So Again, Thiessen would have us believe both that “waterboarding is not torture” and that “torture is necessary,” even though in this case, it resulted in the target both refusing to disclose the relevant information and mocking his interrogators. It's not as though KSM had to be tortured into lying and piquing interrogators interest in the courier.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey, on the other hand, argued that KSM gave up the nickname of the courier that led to bin Laden. Except as Ben Armbruster points out, Panetta said that didn't happen -- that officials initially learned the courier's name from a detainee not in CIA custody and that when asked about him, KSM downplayed his importance. This, again, is supposed to be evidence that torture was helpful in finding bin Laden.
What happened here was simple -- torture defenders assumed that torture played a large role in catching bin Laden. It was a way for them to give Bush credit for finding him without simply saying so. They initially overestimated the role of torture in producing the relevant information, betting that subsequent disclosures would prove them right. What's happened so far is that the evidence has weighed almost entirely in the opposite direction -- that torture not only didn't work but, as Marcy Wheeler notes, that it may have been actively counterproductive in misleading analysts about the level of bin Laden's continued leadership of al-Qaeda. The more we learn about how bin Laden was actually caught, the less the pro-torture narrative makes any sense.
