Keep America Afraid

This is a dope web ad. Hope it spreads like wildfire!



By the way Democratic ad people, that song at the end of the ad, you know the same song featured prominently in the movie "Donnie Darko"? Yeah, that's good background music for attack ads.

Just sayin

Will The MSM Ask The Cheney's About Their Lies?

Don't worry, that was a rhetorical question.

From Michael Isikoff:

A crucial CIA memo that has been cited by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials as justifying the effectiveness of waterboarding contained “plainly inaccurate information” that undermined its conclusions, according to Justice Department investigators.

Cheney has publicly called for the release of the CIA’s still classified memo and another document, insisting their disclosure will bolster his claim that the rough interrogation tactics he vigorously pushed for while in the White House yielded actionable intelligence that foiled terrorist plots against the United States.

But a just released report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the lawyers who approved the CIA’s interrogation program could prove awkward for Cheney and his supporters. The report provides new information about the contents of one of the never released agency memos, concluding that it significantly misstated the timing of the capture of one Al Qaeda suspect in order to make a claim that seems to have been patently false.

snip

The CIA memo, called the Effectiveness Memo, was especially important because it was relied on by Steven G. Bradbury, then the Justice Department’s acting chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, to write memos in 2005 and 2007 giving the agency additional legal approvals to continue its program of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” The memo reviewed the results of the use of EITs – which included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced nudity – mainly against two suspects” Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the report states. One key claim in the agency memo was that the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogations of Zubaydah led to the capture of suspected “dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla. “Abu Zubaydah provided significant information on two operatives, Jose Padilla and Binyam Mohammed, who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area,” the CIA memo stated, according to the OPR report. “Zubaydah’s reporting led to the arrest of Padilla on his arrival in Chicago in May 2003 [sic].”

But as the Justice report points out, this was wrong. “In fact, Padilla was arrested in May 2002, not 2003 … The information ‘[leading] to the arrest of Padilla’ could not have been obtained through the authorized use of EITs.” (The use of enhanced interrogations was not authorized until Aug. 1, 2002 and Zubaydah was not waterboarded until later that month.) “ Yet Bradbury relied upon this plainly inaccurate information” in two OLC memos that contained direct citations from the CIA Effectiveness Memo about the interrogations of Zubaydah, the Justice report states.

As Newsweek reported last year, the information about Padilla’s plot was actually elicited from Zubaydah during traditional interrogations in the spring of 2002 by two FBI agents, one of whom, Ali Soufan, vigorously objected when the CIA started using aggressive tactics. The Justice report faults Bradbury for not pushing the CIA to backup its effectiveness claims. “We question whether it was reasonable for Bradbury not to have demanded more specific information before concluding that the use of EITs was both essential and effective in disrupting terrorist attacks,” the report states.

Look I like the show "24" as much as the next guy, but that isn't real life. At some point the folks who think it should some kind of "toughness" to torture detainees are going to have to wake up to the reality that not only didn't it work but the time invested in torturing took time away from doing the really effective interrogation techniques that actually DO work and put everyone at risk if there really was a so called ticking time bomb scenario.

It is what it is.

(h/t Greg Sargent)

And I Bet He STILL Gets Quoted By WingNuts On Waterboarding

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

No matter that Kiriakou wearily said he shared the anguish of millions of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, over the CIA's application of the medieval confession technique.

The point was that it worked. And the pro-torture camp was quick to pick up on Kiriakou's claim.

snip

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.

"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."

But never mind, he says now.

"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

foreignpolicy.com

"Waterboarding kept us safe" was, is, and always has been a load of bullshit meant to justify the indulgences of cowards. Sadly, no matter how many of these stories come out now, the wingnuts and many other people who just don't follow the news closely will never acknowledge and or realize just how opposite it was from the truth.

Rachel Gives Democrats The Blueprint

Now the question is if they will follow...

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Ed Schultz And Eric Massa Just Went In On Dick Cheney

Will post video as soon as it comes available. Must see TV

Update: As promised. Enjoy

If You Want Something Done Guess You Gotta Do It Yourself

Since Congressional Democrats have basically been mute over the GOP attacks on President Obama after the Northwest flight 253 attempted terrorist attack, the White House decided to pushback themselves.

Hard...

The Same Old Washington Blame Game
Posted by Dan Pfeiffer on December 30, 2009 at 03:34 PM EST

There has been a lot of discussion online and in the mainstream media about our response to various critics of the President, specifically former Vice President Cheney, who have been coming out of the woodwork since the incident on Christmas Day. I think we all agree that there should be honest debate about these issues, but it is telling that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the Administration than condemning the attackers. Unfortunately too many are engaged in the typical Washington game of pointing fingers and making political hay, instead of working together to find solutions to make our country safer.

First, it’s important that the substantive context be clear: for seven years after 9/11, while our national security was overwhelmingly focused on Iraq – a country that had no al Qaeda presence before our invasion – Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's leadership was able to set up camp in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they continued to plot attacks against the United States. Meanwhile, al Qaeda also regenerated in places like Yemen and Somalia, establishing new safe-havens that have grown over a period of years. It was President Obama who finally implemented a strategy of winding down the war in Iraq, and actually focusing our resources on the war against al Qaeda – more than doubling our troops in Afghanistan, and building partnerships to target al Qaeda’s safe-havens in Yemen and Somalia. And in less than one year, we have already seen many al Qaeda leaders taken out, our alliances strengthened, and the pressure on al Qaeda increased worldwide.

To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President.

Second, the former Vice President makes the clearly untrue claim that the President – who is this nation’s Commander-in-Chief – needs to realize we are at War. I don’t think anyone realizes this very hard reality more than President Obama. In his inaugural, the President said “our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” In a recent speech, Assistant to the President for Terrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan said “Instead, as the president has made clear, we are at war with al-Qaida, which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaida’s murderous agenda. These are the terrorists we will destroy; these are the extremists we will defeat.” At West Point, the President told the nation why it was “in our vital national interest” to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to fight the war in Afghanistan, adding that as Commander in Chief, “I see firsthand the terrible wages of war.” And at Oslo, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, the President said, “We are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land.”

There are numerous other such public statements that explicitly state we are at war. The difference is this: President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered.

I couldn't really find a way to excerpt that post by Dan Pfieffer and I hope they don't mind but I thought it important enough to quote the whole thing. Of course if there were some Democrats in Washington willing to hit back themselves, this post wouldn't be necessary. But as we have seen by now with the health care fight, Democrats in Washington are still looking for a spine.

Meh

Cue The Wingnut Freakout And The Cheney's On TV

The Obama administration will announce today that they will be transferring GITMO prisoners to a prison in Illinois.


I think I am going to turn off the TV and unplug for the rest of the week.

Alan Grayson Tells Dick Cheney To Shut The Fuck Up

He couldn't say it on national Tee Vee so I just translated the acronym for him.



We need more of this, truly...

They Are Who We Thought They Were

The Cheneys are immoral and reprehensible people and just a piss poor sychophantic family. Nobody should expect them to ever take the high road. They have not a wit of familiarity with it.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The Appropriate Response

Gibby delivers some pretty sharp snark here to Dick Cheney and the members of the White House press corps trying to carry water for him.

Why Are People Surprised?

Dick Cheney is a loathsome, dishonest, war criminal who probably prays every day that we have a major failure in national security so that his policies will be vindicated or at least forgotten. I don't understand why people keep acting surprised at his irresponsible and unpatriotic speeches. The sooner we stop paying him any serious attention the sooner we can move on with fixing all the messes he helped to leave behind.

It is what it is.

Breaking: Dick Cheney FBI Interview Ordered Released To The Public

Looks like Jon Stewart will get his crack at Dick Cheney after all!

(h/t Ethan)

Ali Soufan Calls Bullshit On Dick Cheney And The Rest Of The Torture Advocates

Former FBI interrogator, Ali Soufan, is back with another op ed in the New York Times. This time he takes apart Dick Cheney's assertion that the CIA IG report vindicated his position that torture "worked". Spencer Ackerman has a really good post up about it and I suggest reading that in addition to the op ed but I wanted to highlight a particular part of the op ed which should be repeated over and over like an echo whenever Dick Cheney or his wingnut daughter Liz appears on any cable news shows again.

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out.

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

The Mr. Mohammed Soufan is referring to is Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Now this is the central point that I feel like liberals and progressives are loathe to explore because whether torture worked or not, it was illegal and should have never been pursued. I get the sense that many of us on the left also are hesitant to press the case because we think there is a chance that torture did yield useful information. Now on the one hand I am sure that torturing normal people is prone to making them tell more than they would without it. But members of Al Qaeda are not regular people anymore than our soldiers are regular people. And above and beyond that no matter how much information was given up, there still is the question of if it was credible. We have a culture whereby we have been conditioned to believe that because torture works in movies or on popular Tee Vee shows then it works in real life. But the truth, as counterintiutive as it might be to some of us, is that it doesn't.

As Ali Soufan points out, if torture was so effective then why the hell haven't we caught the Al Qaeda leadership, all of whom were know to KSM? Why didn't he tell us where they were and what they were up to? Why don't we have bin Ladin's head on a platter right now when instead, 8 years after 9/11 the guy is still putting out propaganda tapes? Can anybody answer that one? Can one single torture advocate answer that question?

Traditional interrogation was never tried on KSM, and that's the dirty little secret that nobody, including the mainstream media, ever wants to talk about. Soufan points out in the op ed all the information extracted from other HVDs who were tortured because the FBI was still allowed to use traditional interrogations either before or after the torture. When they were able to use traditional interrogtions prior to the torture they were able to extract information just fine and the torture wasn't even necessary and only ended up making the detainee shut down to the point where the FBI had to be called back in time and time again just to get them to start back talking. In the cases where traditional interrogation was used after the detainees were tortured the interrogators had to work their asses off to undue the harm the torture had done just to get the detainees to talk. In short, torture made it harder and less likely to get information out of the detainees in just about every single instance. This isn't some DFH saying it, its a hardened FBI interrogator who actually was in the room and got good information from several members of Al Qaeda and helped prosecute them both here and abroad.

Now I realize that torture advocates will never admit that torture didn't work and actually harmed our efforts to head off more attacks, but its time for everyone else to start calling bullshit on them too. Its not enough just to stick to the legality of the situation when the other side is appealing to people's primal instinct for revenge. People need to know that our ability to extract revenge was actually hurt by people like Dick Cheney ordering torture. As Soufan infers with his rhetorical question the very reason we don't have Al Qaeda's leadership dead or in custody now is precisely because Cheney ordered the torture of the men who could have led us right to them.

At some point we have to say that and keep repeating it until it sinks in to the public's consciousness. Otherwise we leave open the possibility that Dick Cheney gets to revise history to his benefit. And I don't think any of us wants that to happen.

DNC Kisses Cheney

Nice to see somebody touching this fool up. I'll have a post up on Cheney and a lie he told awhile back that still bothers me before the night is over.

Cheney, Torture, And The Gestapo

For all of the fault that I find with many of Andrew Sullivan's positions on government spending, on torture he may "get it" more than any other blogger in the country. Or rather I should say he may "get it" and be able to explain it better than anybody else. This at the end of his post about torture in which he PWNED his colleague, Marc Ambinder, should be repeated all over the liberal and progressive blogosphere because its real, and it resonates.

Nonetheless, the US-run court ruled that Cheney-style EITs, deployed by the Gestapo with the same justification as Cheney, constituted prosecutable torture:

As extenuating circumstances, [accused torturer] Bruns had pleaded various incidents in which he had helped Norwegians, Schubert had pleaded difficulties at home, and Clemens had pointed to several hundred interrogations during which he had treated prisoners humanely.

The Court did not regard any of the above-mentioned circumstances as a sufficient reason for mitigating the punishment and found it necessary to act with the utmost severity. Each of the defendants was responsible for a series of incidents of torture, every one of which could, according to Art. 3 (a), (c) and (d) of the Provisional Decree of 4th May, 1945, be punished by the death sentence.

And they were executed for war crimes.

The question Americans have to ask themselves is why they hold the former president and vice-president to lower moral and ethical standards than the United States once held the Gestapo. That's all. And that's everything, isn't it?

When he puts it in those terms I think its hard for most average people to support the torture that the Bush/Cheney Administration ordered no matter how many episodes of "24" they have watched.

Some Things Just Never Get Old

Like Dan Froomkin calling bullshit on Dick Cheney and the media coverage of him.

Beautiful!

Using Cheney Logic

Dick Cheney was his usually morally repugnant self yesterday on FoxNews Sunday, shamelessly advocating torture. And there is a lot in the interview for people to take apart but I want to focus on something he said early on. Its one of the best recent example of Orwellian double speak that I could possibly even imagine. First lets look at the question and answer in its entirety and then we can take it apart a little.

WALLACE: This is your first interview since Attorney General Holder named a prosecutor to investigate possible CIA abuses of terror detainees.

What do you think of that decision?

CHENEY: I think it's a terrible decision. President Obama made the announcement some weeks ago that this would not happen, that his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel. And the effort now is based upon the inspector general's report that was sent to the Justice Department five years ago, was completely reviewed by the Justice Department in years past.

They made decisions about whether or not there was any prosecutable offense there. They found one. It did not involve CIA personnel, it involved contract personnel. That individual was sentenced and is doing time. The matter's been dealt with the way you would expect it to be dealt with by professionals.

Now we've got a political appointee coming back, and supposedly without the approval of the president, going to do a complete review, or another complete investigation, possible prosecution of CIA personnel. We could talk the whole program about the negative consequences of that, about the terrible precedent it sets, to have agents involved, CIA personnel involved, in a difficult program that's approved by the Justice Department, approved by the National Security Council, and the Bush administration, and then when a new administration comes in, it becomes political.

They may find themselves dragged up before a grand jury, have to hire attorneys on their own because the Justice Department won't provide them with counsel.

It's a terrible, terrible precedent.

Ok lets work backwards here. Dick Cheney is worried about a special prosecutor looking into whether or not any CIA personnel broke the law by going outside the guidance of the OLC memos. He says the fallout from such a probe woudl be:

We could talk the whole program about the negative consequences of that, about the terrible precedent it sets, to have agents involved, CIA personnel involved, in a difficult program that's approved by the Justice Department, approved by the National Security Council, and the Bush administration, and then when a new administration comes in, it becomes political.

They may find themselves dragged up before a grand jury, have to hire attorneys on their own because the Justice Department won't provide them with counsel.

It's a terrible, terrible precedent

So he says that it will set a "terrible precedent" and that the decision to look into the program is "political" He then goes further shortly after in another answer to describe what he thinks will be the impact of this investigation.

CHENEY: Well, you think, for example, in the intelligence arena. We ask those people to do some very difficult things. Sometimes, that put their own lives at risk. They do so at the direction of the president, and they do so with the -- in this case, we had specific legal authority from the Justice Department. And if they are now going to be subject to being investigated and prosecuted by the next administration, nobody's going to sign up for those kinds of missions.

It's a very, very devastating, I think, effect that it has on morale inside the intelligence community. If they assume that they're going to have to be dealing with the political consequences -- and it's clearly a political move. I mean, there's no other rationale for why they're doing this -- then they'll be very reluctant in the future to do that.

So this investigation is going to lead to nobody wanting to "sign up for those kinds of missions" and its going to have a "very, very devastating...effect...on morale inside the intelligence community".

Well my goodness who knew that just investigating to see if any wrongdoing occured should have such adverse effects on the intelligence community? But wait, there is one thing that isn't really adding up to me here. If investigating the CIA for wrong doing creates so many problems, why did the Bush administration do just that?

Lets go back to the Cheney's answer again.

And the effort now is based upon the inspector general's report that was sent to the Justice Department five years ago, was completely reviewed by the Justice Department in years past.

They made decisions about whether or not there was any prosecutable offense there. They found one. It did not involve CIA personnel, it involved contract personnel. That individual was sentenced and is doing time. The matter's been dealt with the way you would expect it to be dealt with by professionals.

So wait, Dick Cheney himself admits that the Justice Department while he was still Vice President did in fact investigate and prosecute at least one bad actor in this whole situation. He makes the distinction that it was a CIA contractor but the truth is the two men who actually orchestrated the torture program were ALSO CIA contractors too so its a distinction but not much of one. Now using his own logic shouldn't this have devastated the CIA?! Shouldn't they have all been pulling out their fainting couches and refusing to protect the nation after that prosecution? Shouldn't we have been attacked by bin Ladin many times over due to the fact that DOJ even looked into the allegations put forth by the CIA's Inspector general? And wasn't Alberto Gonzales who led that inquiry ALSO a political appointee?

Oh wait, I keep forgetting, Its Okay If You're A Republican.

What would be great would be if some journalist points out this contradiction in the man's logic, but I won't hold my breath.

Greg Sargent Keeps PWNING Sock Puppet Stephen Hayes

Please for the love of God and all that is sacred in blogging, somebody throw in the towel for Stephen Hayes. He didn't really want it with Hov Greg!

They Didn't Know What The Fuck They Were Doing

More great reporting from Spencer Ackerman:

In the August 1, 2002 memo written by Bybee and Yoo, the lawyers summarize and refer repeatedly to what the CIA told them about how the “enhanced interrogation techniques” are supposed to work, as well as to assurances that the lawyers then consider material for whether the proposed actions violate U.S. laws. For instance, discussing waterboarding, they write, that water would be applied “in a controlled manner,” and that the CIA orally informed them that “this procedure triggers an automatic physiological sensation of drowning that the individual cannot control even though he may be aware that he is in fact not drowning.”

Just one problem: CIA medical personal objected to the description that OTS gave to the Justice Department as factually inaccurate.

Addressing the discrepancies between how waterboarding worked in the SERE school and how it worked at CIA and other torture techniques that changed between on-paper justification and in-the-field practice, a footnote to the inspector general’s 2004 report reads:

According to the Chief, Medical Services, OMS [the CIA's Office of Medical Services] was neither consulted nor involved in the initial analysis of the risk and benefits of EITs [”enhanced interrogation techniques,” nor provided with the OTS report cited in the OLC opinion. In retrospect, based on the OLC extracts of the OTS report, OMS contends that the reported sophistication of the preliminary EIT review was probably exaggerated, at least as it related to the waterboard, and that the power of this EIT was appreciably overstated in the report. Furthermore, OMS contends that the expertise of the SERE psychologist/interrogators on the waterboard was probably misrepresented at the time, as the SERE waterboard experience is so different from the subsequent Agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant. Consequently, according to OMS, there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe.

I ask that you read that excerpt several times slowly and let it sink in. Bush, Cheney et all trusted our national security, basically our very lives, to two guys who didn't know what the hell they were doing with no evidence that what they were proposing would work. And that is notion is supported by FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who himself pulled a lot of information out of high value Al Qa'ida detainees using traditional methods, in his testimony before Congress earlier this year.

A major problem is that it is ineffective. Al Qaeda terrorists are trained to resist torture. As shocking as these techniques are to us, the al Qaeda training prepares them for much worse – the torture they would expect to receive if caught by dictatorships for example.

This is why, as we see from the recently released Department of Justice memos on interrogation, the contractors had to keep getting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods, until they reached waterboarding and then there was nothing they could do but use that technique again and again. Abu Zubaydah had to be waterboarded 83 times and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times. In a democracy there is a glass ceiling of harsh techniques the interrogator cannot breach, and a detainee can eventually call the interrogator's bluff.

In addition the harsh techniques only serves to reinforce what the detainee has been prepared to expect if captured. This gives him a greater sense of control and predictability about his experience, and strengthens his will to resist.

A second major problem with this technique is that evidence gained from it is unreliable. There is no way to know whether the detainee is being truthful, or just speaking to either mitigate his discomfort or to deliberately provide false information. As the interrogator isn't an expert on the detainee or the subject matter, nor has he spent time going over the details of the case, the interrogator cannot easily know if the detainee is telling the truth. This unfortunately has happened and we have had problems ranging from agents chasing false leads to the disastrous case of Ibn Sheikh al-Libby who gave false information on Iraq, al Qaeda, and WMD.

A third major problem with this technique is that it is slow. It takes place over a long period of time, for example preventing the detainee from sleeping for 180 hours as the memos detail, or waterboarding 183 times in the case of KSM. When we have an alleged "ticking timebomb" scenario and need to get information quickly, we can't afford to wait that long.

Bush and Cheney ordered torture not because it would keep us safe but because it would make them feel macho. Like they were "real" men. And they put all of us at risk in the meanwhile. Anybody who claims to be concerned about terrorism and national security should be outraged about this. Unfortunately Republicans only care about their party at this point so there won't be any accountability forthcoming from their side fo the aisle.

It is what it is.

Attackerman Ethers Dick Cheney

Thanks to Spencer Ackerman's fine work on the two torture documents that Dick Cheney sought to release, ostensibly to prove that torture worked, we now have it confirmed that Cheney is a lying sack of shit!

For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that two documents prepared by the CIA, one from 2004 and the other from 2005, would refute critics of the Bush administration’s torture program. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity in April:

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here. Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

The first document, issued by the CIA in July 2004 is about the interrogation of 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and whom, the newly released CIA Inspector General report on torture details, had his children’s lives threatened by an interrogator. None of that abuse is referred to in the publicly released version of the July 2004 document. Instead, we learn from the July 2004 document that not only did the man known as “KSM” largely provide intelligence about “historical plots” pulled off from al-Qaeda, a fair amount of the knowledge he imparted to his interrogators came from his “rolodex” — that is, what intelligence experts call “pocket litter,” or the telling documentation found on someone’s person when captured. As well, traditional intelligence work appears to have done wonders — including a fair amount of blundering on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s part:

In response to questions about [al-Qaeda's] efforts to acquire [weapons of mass destruction], [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] revealed that he had met three individuals involved in [al-Qaeda's] program to produce anthrax. He appears to have calculated, incorrectly, that we had this information already, given that one of the three — Yazid Sufaat — had been in foreign custody for several months.

This is a far cry from torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into revealing such information. It would be tendentious to believe that the torture didn’t have any impact on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — he himself said that he lied to interrogators in order to get the torture to stop — but the document itself doesn’t attempt to present a case that the “enhanced interrogation” program was a factor, let alone the determinant factor, in the intelligence bounty the document says he provided.

The second newly released document — a June 2005 overview of information extracted from detainees — is, if anything, more caveated. In making a case that “detainee reporting” was “pivotal for the war against [al-Qaeda],” it says that “detainee reporting is often incomplete or too general to lead directly to arrests; instead, detainees provide critical pieces to the puzzle, which, when combined with other reporting, have helped direct an investigation’s focus and led to the capture of terrorists.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the prime example here.

The document also discusses unraveling the network of Indonesian al-Qaeda affiliate Hambali after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s capture. There are repeated references to the value of “debriefings,” which the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report says are distinct from the “enhanced interrogation techniques” but can be used after they occur. For instance, “Debriefings of mid-level [al-Qaeda] operatives also have reported on specific plots against U.S. interests.” Indeed, in a section titled “Aiding Our Understanding [al-Qaeda],” a listed example is:

Abu Zubaydah’s identification early in his detention of [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of 11 September and [al-Qaeda's] premier terrorist planner and of ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri as another key [al-Qaeda] operational planner corroborated information [REDACTED].

Those revelations, as former Abu Zubaydah interrogator Ali Soufan has testified, came before Abu Zubaydah was tortured.

snip

Again, perhaps the blacked-out lines of the memos specifically claim and document that torture and only torture yielded this information. But what’s released within them does not remotely make that case. Cheney’s public account of these documents have conflated the difference between information acquired from detainees, which the documents present, and information acquired from detainees through the enhanced interrogation program, which they don’t.

I had to exerpt heavily because everything in the piece was tied together and notable but again this is all Spencer Ackerman who put the pieces of he puzzle together and he deserves all the credit. Hopefully there will be some Democrats on the Hill with balls big enough and spines strong enough to use his analysis to beat back the whinefest that we all know is now coming from the GOP.