Newsweek‘s Mark Hosenball says the Inspector General’s report and other recently-released documents pertaining to Bush-era interrogations of top al Qaeda operatives do not show that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) “actually worked.” Hosenball concedes that the detainees gave up a treasure trove of valuable intelligence, but the documents do not “convincingly demonstrate” that the EITs “produced this useful information.” This is likely to be the new conventional wisdom on the documents. It’s wrong, so let’s take it apart. First, here are the four key paragraphs from the Inspector General’s Report that deal specifically with waterboarding – the harshest of the enhanced interrogation techniques – and its effect on intelligence production. They are reproduced below, with redactions noted, because you have to read them together to understand as much of the story as possible. The paragraphs can all be found on pages 90 and 91 of the Inspector General’s Report.