Torture Still Doesn’t Work

It’s difficult to prove a negative, but if you want good evidence that a policy of legalized torture is not an effective intelligence gathering mechanism, I think you don’t need to look much further than how shaky the specific details of the counterclaims coming from the Bushies and the torture apologists are. The best they can come up with is the claim that torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed helped them foil the so-called Library Tower plot to blow up the US Bank Tower (not sure where the library comes from). But as Tim Noah points out, there are all kinds of problems with this claim. Indeed, the argument is such a mess that the fact that the alleged plot was foiled before KSM was even captured isn’t even the only problem with it:

What clinches the falsity of Thiessen’s claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen’s argument) is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush’s counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and “at that point, the other members of the cell” (later arrested) “believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward” [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, “In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast.” These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush’s characterization of it as a “disrupted plot” was “ludicrous”—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn’t captured until March 2003.

I might add that this sorry tale further illustrates some of the problems with torture. You can’t very well say “well, we brutally tortured this guy dozens of times and it was all basically pointless.” Having ordered the torture, you now have a bunch of torturers, orderers of torture, etc. invested in overstating the utility of torture. And of course if torture worked so well on the one guy, why not torture some more people? Indeed, the whole rotten idea of torturing KSM seems to have stemmed in part form an unwillingness to admit that torturing Abu Zubaydah was pointless.

And, worse, all kinds of legitimate intelligence work aimed at trying to understand al-Qaeda’s structure were compromised by the fact that some people now had a strong incentive to keep overstating Zubaydah’s significance.