You ask “The thugs who work for the US government have sought vindication through the OBL assassination by claiming actionable intelligence was obtained via torture. Who is surprised by that? The claim is transparently self-serving and, of course, non-verifiable. After all, we’re dealing with “classified information” that is vital to national security. Right?”

1. In a sense, you are absolutely right. It is classified information. But our Fearless Leader (with a tiny bit of help from his predecessor) released reams and reams of classified documents. So both the techniques themselves and the results of the techniques are known.

Even those who want to deny the utility of harsh interrogation (President Obama and his administration) admit to the sources of the intelligence, and those sources were (as we know from declassified documents) completely and totally unwilling to share any (or further) information prior to harsh interrogation tactics, and willing to share information after being broken by those tactics.

We haven’t been left in the dark, you just have your eyes shut tight.

2. bin Laden admitted to being part of the 9/11 attacks, and he was indicted for the murder of Americans and others in the years leading up to 9/11.

The best we can do is to interpret the evidence as honestly as possible. As far as anyone can tell, bin Laden at the very least supported the acts by making available some or all of the personel, funding, training, logistics support, etc. There is video with him, Wael al-Shehri and Hamza al-Ghamd (two of the 911 “muscle” hijackers), seemingly recorded in the weeks before the attacks. “It includes scenes of men handling weapons and box cutters, and training to overpower others physically.” al-Shehri and al-Ghamd recorded their video martyrdom wills, which were included on the aforementioned video.

There is some debate as to what involvement he had besides that mentioned above. Even leaving aside the much maligned early “fat bin laden” tape (which was really a simple matter of a poor video format conversion), there were later videos where bin Laden himself directly takes personal responsibility for the attacks.
I — and I think most Americans — find it hard to believe that some look at the above evidence (and more I almost certainly forgot to mention), and act as though we are completely in the dark as to UBLs role.

Besides those, there are other videos, audio tapes, written statements, eyewitness accounts (some coerced and some given completely willingly), surveillance reports, reams and reams of material related to investigations (from his terrorism-related indictments), journalistic interviews etc etc backing up the claim that bin Laden is the head of the terrorist organization responsible for the 9/11 (and other) attacks on US citizens.

There really isn’t any doubt as to whether bin Laden bears some moral or legal responsibility for the attacks IF one accepts the commonly accepted evidence. If you don’t accept the commonly accepted evidence because you think he was framed by the US government (patently absurd *given the evidence*), then I have nothing further to say to you and wish you a good day :-]

The fact of the matter is torture is illegal under US law and international treaty of which the US government is a party. Those who ordered and engaged in torture of terrorist suspects (suspects being the operative word) committed crimes and should be tried in a court of law. If our government fails to uphold the law, then the scrutiny of the World Court is necessary.

After sifting though the conflicting accountss of the OBL killing provided by government, it appears the old man was simply murdered by US assassins. He put up no resistance so he should have been taken into custody and put on trial for his alleged crimes. It is interesting to note that the charges against OBL for being the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks were never proven. Indeed, the US government never put forth any real evidence. Bin Laden himself denied being involved in the actual attacks. But if bin Laden was a terrorist mastermind and the head of international terrorist organization capable of killing innocent poeple on every continent, would not have it made sense to capture the him and ask him a few questions?

Your post betrays a critical misunderstanding of the nature of the CIA program. You’re probably right that if death were the ultimate threat, then the system would not be as reliable as it has proven to be.

But death was as far as we know not on the table for the terrorists in question. If you’re interested in debating the issue, take the time to read in detail the memos that our Fearless Leader so helpfully released to the world, including our enemies.

If death was the ultimate threat, it’d likely have been seen as a release and goal for these men, or it might have led to the scenario that you describe above. But it wasn’t. Instead it was ongoing and severe physical and especially psychological pressure. The CIA never let on all that it knew and constantly interspersed questions they knew the answers to with questions they actually needed answered. In fact, that was also part of the breaking process. Each time the terrorist tried to do what you claim, ie, toss out “scraps” or lies or half truths, the CIA would return with just enough information to show that they knew the truth. They played prisoners’ information against one another to insure that a high percentage of a prisoner’s information was accurate ONCE THEY WERE BROKEN. There are known examples of the CIA going back and forth from terrorist A to terrorist B to terrorist C and back to terrorist A again each time building their information enough to challenge the terrorist with more truth to derive still more accurate information. The terrorists soon learned that they couldn’t often lie, and stopped withholding. KSM even went on to request a blackboard and gave “seminars” to the officers.

You really should either read the memos or read something like Courting Disaster (that summarizes the information.) It seems that you (like most who make similar arguments) are imagining medieval or Jack Baur-like torture sessions. The system was *always* designed to have two separate phases: 1) Interrogation (/”torture”) was meant to psychologically break the terrorist so they would cooperate. 2) Debriefing would come only after the terrorist was broken, this is when the CIA would really start to seek accurate information.

Your entire argument is in a sense unfortunately unfalsifiable. We can’t “know” whether a given terrorist might have given information using normal tactics *eventually*. But what we do have is the evidence that the techniques did work as designed. We know of many terrorists that were not cooperating at all (or very little) under normal interrogation, who then spilled their guts during debriefing only after harsh techniques were used to break them. Many, many arrests came through the use of harsh interrogation from suspects who had completely refused to submit to normal interrogation (eg, one terrorist masturbated each time the interrogators showed up, refusing to say a single word.)

Where is your *evidence* that the other tactics would have worked better? Every single time waterboarding was approved for use against a terrorist (that’s a total of three terrorists btw), that terrorist had refused to provide any more information, and then, after the interrogation, provided more.

Yes, that would be wonderfully easy. But then, after you spit out some grudging scraps of info, you would come to realize that I still want more from you, and am not going to actually kill you(In fact there is a simple arithmetic here–If you believe that I actually will eventually kill you(a CRITICAL supposition for this method to yield much of anything), then each time I ask you for information, you are more reluctant to yield any, fearing that you might finally give me the thing that I want, and end your usefulness to me. Therefore, each bit of info you give will be calculated to be less likely to be valuable than the last. This alone causes the torture methodology to fail the timeliness test.) Once you know I will not kill you, you are free to play along, mis-informing, tossing out scraps to end each torture session, settling into the dynamic, realizing that YOU are actually in control.

Torture advocates, like Jared, will often point to random bits of info as proof of torture’s effectiveness. This “post, ergo propter” reading of the info that led to Bin Laden ignores that other methods were what ultimately yielded that knowledge.

The desire to prove “toughness” is common to many cultures, and leads to the supposition that “tough” interrogation MUST be effective. Sadly, this is proven to be far from true. It may be effective, but is it not predictably so, nor is its product of sufficient quality or quantity to make it the preferred method. Interrogators who torture prisoners are admitting that they lack the inner fortitude and intellect to sit across the table from a prisoner and talk to him or her until they find the places where the prisoner’s humanity shows, and then leverage those real emotions to cause the prisoner to share what they know, not from fear, but from desire. It is a truth that torturers TELL more about themselves by their acts then they learn about their prisoners.

Quibbling about weather water-boarding is or is not torture is silly. It is coercive, and creates greater animosity between interrogator and prisoner. It is a method for a bully, not a professional.

If it were a matter of morals, one could argue that hurting one person to save the lives of many is a legitimate transaction. Sadly, this is not the applicable math. The real equation is how to best save the lives of the greatest number, and torture is less effective than other, well tested, difficult, but teachable, methods. Torture fails the timeliness, quantity, and, most important, quality tests.

No one can now deny that subjects who were initially unhelpful (one of whom — KSM — was described as “superhuman” in his resistance to standard interrogation) later revealed information that ultimately led to the capture of bin Laden. Indeed, based on the evidence we now have, without the “mere nickname” shared by KSM, the chain of information that ultimately led to bin Laden’s death would never have begun.

In fact, this completely undermines a meaty portion of the claims made in this article.

Said above: “If you gave the detainee any reason not to trust you, there is no negotiation, Cloonan explained. The detainee won’t be willing to bargain with giving up his knowledge in exchange for something the interrogator can provide. He simply won’t trust you. Torture, Cloonan says, shatters any possibility for trust. “It changes the dynamic,” Cloonan said. “And once you have gone down that path, in my experience there is no going back.””

Wasn’t KSM given a reason not to trust his interrogators? After all, they tortured him, repeatedly. But this same article argues against the efficacy of torture by saying that he gave the most important information (regarding the courier of bin Laden) years after he was tortured. So, quite obviously, we have at least one very important example of a man who was unhelpful, then was tortured, then later gave up important information under standard interrogation techniques. But I thought that the harsh techniques destroyed all chance of establishing trust in the future and getting information from a detainee? It seems that you can’t claim that BOTH 1) KSM didn’t reveal his information because of torture, since it came later AND 2) Once you’ve tortured someone, you cannot expect him to provide useful information. That’s exactly what this article claims, but held together with the known facts (ie, KSM talked after being waterboarded), they form a contradiction.

I have some advice for the anti-torture folks. You can make a decent argument based on the immorality of the techniques, or that the damage it causes to our image outweighs the information that can be gained, or perhaps even that it’s a very risky technique. But you cannot say that it doesn’t ever work, or that it doesn’t ever provide true information. It does. This really cannot be argued now that we have the facts. And we’ve known this for a quite some time. UBL’s courier was a tiny (but important) fraction of the information these men gave us only after resisting standard interrogation and later being waterboarded.

I leave you with this:

“the first terrorist to be subjected to enhanced techniques, Zubaydah, told his interrogators something stunning. According to the Justice Department memos released by the Obama administration, Zubaydah explained that “brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.” In other words, the terrorists are called by their religious ideology to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know.

Several senior officials told me that, after undergoing waterboarding, Zubaydah actually thanked his interrogators and said, “*You must do this for all the brothers.*” [emphasis added] The enhanced interrogation techniques were a relief for Zubaydah, they said, because they lifted a moral burden from his shoulders — the responsibility to continue resisting.

The importance of this revelation cannot be overstated: Zubaydah had given the CIA the secret code for breaking al-Qaeda detainees. CIA officials now understood that the job of the interrogator was to give the captured terrorist something to resist, so he could do his duty to Allah and then feel liberated to speak. So they developed techniques that would allow terrorists to resist safely, without any lasting harm. Indeed, they specifically designed techniques to give the terrorists the false perception that what they were enduring was far worse than what was actually taking place.” – Courting Disaster

BTW, this is the same guy that resisted our efforts at standard interrogation, but — after enhanced interrogation — gave up the codename Mukhtar. Because he gave up this codename, analysts were able to piece together the information that led them to KSM (and from KSM — after enhanced interrogation — to the courier, and from the courier to bin Laden.)

Hmm, another link in the chain that led to UBL, that would not have existed had “torture” been avoided.