Team Torture's Disastrous PR Offensive

[kpete]

Team Torture's Disastrous PR Offensive

Adam Serwer | May 17, 2011 | Adam Serwer's Blog

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.

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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 “these 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.

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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.

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