Dick Cheney’s Torture Works! tour continues to run into reporting suggesting otherwise. On Sunday, the Washington Post published an article entitled “Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots.”
The headline effectively summarized the story of the interrogation of Abu Zubaida, the C.I.A.’s “first high-value captive,” taken in March 2002 and subjected to “waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods”:
The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.
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.
The article, by reporters Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, was picked up yesterday by the Post’s White House Watch blogger Dan Froomkin, who underscored its importance:
Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration’s argument for torture.
That’s why Sunday’s front-page Washington Post story . . . is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists. . . .
Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House. Then he was President George W. Bush’s Exhibit A in defense of the “enhanced interrogation” procedures that constituted torture. And he continues to be held up as a justification for torture by its most ardent defenders.
But as author Ron Suskind reported almost three years ago — and as The Post now confirms — almost all the key assertions the Bush administration made about Zubaida were wrong.
Zubaida wasn’t a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn’t holding back critical information. His torture didn’t produce valuable intelligence — and it certainly didn’t save lives.
All the calculations the Bush White House claims to have made in its decision to abandon long-held moral and legal strictures against abusive interrogation turn out to have been profoundly flawed, not just on a moral basis but on a coldly practical one as well.
Which is not to say that elements from the former Bush administration are not fighting back. Yesterday morning, Karl Rove pointed his 33,000-plus followers on Twitter to a post at the National Review with this tweet: “Powerful rebuttal of WaPo story . . . alleging interrogation of Zubaydah foiled no plots.”
That “powerful rebuttal” was written by Marc Thiessen, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush, who argued that the Post article was part of “the Left’s assault on the CIA program” and was “rife with errors and misinformation.”
Among the article’s points that Thiessen took issue with are these:
Abu Zubaydah disclosed to the CIA during this period was that the fact that KSM was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and that his code name was “Muktar” — something Zubaydah thought we already knew, but in fact we did not. Intelligence officials had been trying for months to figure out who “Muktar” was. This information provided by Zubaydah was a critical piece of the puzzle that allowed them to pursue and eventually capture KSM. This fact, in and of itself, discredits the premise of the Post story – to suggest that the capture of KSM was not information that “foiled plots” to attack America is absurd on the face of it. . . .
The Post also acknowledges that Zubaydah’s “interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla” but dismisses Padilla as the man behind a fanciful “dirty bomb” plot and notes that Padilla was never charged in any such plot.
In addition, Thiessen said, Zubayda provided “information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th, including Ramzi bin al Shibh.”
Thiessen’s rejoinder to the Post was answered by Adam Serwer, writing at the the American Prospect, who said Thiessen was repeating “already discredited claims that torture led to Zubayda disclosing valuable intelligence” and obscuring “the facts about what useful information Zubayda actually provided”:
As Jane Mayer points out in The Dark Side, Zubayda did give up Padilla and KSM’s nickname, “Mukhtar.” He did both before being tortured.
In regard Ramzi bin Al Shibh, Serwer said that:
Thiessen omits entirely the key role that an Al Jazeera journalist played in securing his capture: After interviewing bin Al Shibh and KSM in Karachi, the reporter passed on information about their location to his boss, who then passed on the information to the Emir of Qatar, who passed it on to the CIA, which led to bin Al Shibh being apprehended along with other terrorism suspects.
Serwer concludes:
The Post story is therefore accurate: torturing Zubayda produced little actionable intelligence, and none of what Thiessen claims. But as I said before, because torture cannot be defended on moral or legal terms, retroactively manufacturing successes is the only recourse.
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Full article: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/a-tortured-rationale-for-torture/
