The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent is worked up about the fact that “big news orgs” have not declared Dick Cheney a liar for claiming that EITs were effective. (For the record, many people still consider the Washington Post a big news org.) Sargent argues that “the docs themselves don’t actually prove Cheney’s claims” that the EITs were effective, he suggests that those who believe otherwise don’t live in “the real world,” and he calls the coverage “embarrassing.” So why the reluctance? Maybe it’s because of the mainstream media’s well-known pro-Cheney bias. We all remember the endless stream of flattering pieces about Cheney’s ability to keep secrets, his willingness to listen quietly in meetings, and his eagerness to sacrifice his own personal popularity to defend unpopular policies that he believed kept the nation safe. Or maybe it’s because the documents — including the much-ballyhooed Inspector General report — actually do demonstrate that EITs were effective. Consider the IG report’s section on Abd al Rahim al Nashiri.
Let’s examine those last two sentences again. “Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al Nashiri became more willing to provide information.” The context makes the meaning clear: We cannot specify which EIT made al Nashiri more willing to provide more information. And in case there were any doubt, the final sentence is categorical. “Following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.” Similarly, on page 91, the IG report notes that Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, “an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete.” But four pages earlier, we learn from the IG about the valuable information that KSM did give up. KSM
So, we know that before KSM was waterboarded, he gave up virtually nothing and what little intelligence he did provide was mostly “outdated, inaccurate or incomplete.” And we also know that some of KSM’s interrogations provided detailed, valuable information that led to the detention of sleeper agents in the United States plotting attacks. Despite this, Sargent wants to believe — and wants big news orgs to report — that this second batch of intelligence reports from KSM — the highly-valuable ones — came from the pre-waterboarding interrogations. In another post, Sargent chastises Cheney for defending the interrogators and “claiming to speak for them and positioning himself as their brave and lonely defender.” Sargent notes that some interrogators were worried that their participation in the program put them in legal jeopardy and cites a passage on page 94 of the IG report. Here is how Sargent reported it:
He concludes: “That Cheney is now claiming to speak for, and defend, the same class of officers who worried his policies were putting them at risk is only the latest sign of how absurd Cheney’s stance has been throughout.” Why the ellipses? What did Sargent cut out? Here is the passage in full:
So Sargent cut out two important passages to make his point. The first had to do with concerns among interrogators that they would not be supported if they were later targeted for their work — exactly the kind of support Sargent scolds Cheney for providing. And second, in his effort to portray CIA officers as victims, Sargent deliberately omits the view of the Agency officer who told the IG, “it has to be done.” And whose policies were these? Sargent calls them the “Bush/Cheney torture policies.” Did he read the IG report? The EITs were conceived and developed by senior intelligence officers who wanted to find additional ways to extract information from terrorists. From page 3: “The Agency was under pressure to do everything possible to prevent additional terrorist attacks. Senior Agency officials believe Abu Zubaydah was withholding information that could not be obtained through then-authorized interrogation techniques. Agency officials believed that a more robust approach was necessary to elicit threat information from Abu Zubaydah and possibly from other senior al Qaeda high value detainees.” [Emphasis added] So set aside the so-called Cheney memos. Any honest analysis of the IG report alone shows that these three high-value detainees were largely uncooperative before the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques and produced critical information after the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques.
