Memo to the President: E.I.T. Worked and Saved Lives

'TORTURE' WORKS
INTERROGATIONS FOILED PLOTS

IF Dick Cheney had a fantasy scenario for how the Bush administration interrogation program worked, it might go like this: A top al Qaeda operative is captured, but resists traditional interrogation. He's then waterboarded, after which he becomes an invaluable resource. Eventually, the terrorist conducts tutorials on al Qaeda doctrine and operations for the benefit of US intelligence officers.

Except it's not a fable. It describes the course of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed's post-capture career, according to The Washington Post. The Post report, together with CIA documents released in the last week, demolishes a key argument of opponents of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques -- that " 'torture' never works."

This contention always betrayed an insecurity. For all their thundering about the immorality of coercive interrogations, opponents never dared admit that they could have elicited important, perhaps lifesaving, information. They treated it as a kind of metaphysical impossibility.

In so doing, they left a hostage to fortune. They had to hope that Cheney was wrong when he said that classified documents proved the interrogations' effectiveness, or that the documents would never be declassified. The release of the 2004 Central Intelligence Agency inspector general's report -- declassified thanks to an ACLU lawsuit -- has been a disaster for them. In the intelligence business, it's called blowback.

The IG report said detainees in the interrogation program made the CIA aware of plots to attack the US consulate in Karachi, Pakistan; to fly hijacked aircraft into Heathrow Airport; to derail a train in America; to blow up US gas stations; to fly an airplane into the tallest building in California; and to collapse bridges in New York. If any of these attacks had come off, many of the same critics braying about the CIA's interrogations would be outraged about its failure to "connect the dots."

The IG report doesn't flatly assert that the interrogations were responsible for this intelligence haul, but the facts make it obvious. Top terrorists were withholding information before the application of the toughest techniques, but compliant afterward.

The report says KSM was "an accomplished resistor," who gave mostly "outdated, inaccurate or incomplete" information until he was waterboarded. Afterward, he became the "most prolific" source of important leads.

The IG report says KSM's cooperation led to the arrest of a truck driver in the US named Iyman Faris who was plotting attacks on New York landmarks; of a sleeper operative in New York named Saleh Almari; of an operative named Majid Khan who had easy entree into the US; and of two Pakistani businessmen whom KSM "planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States."

Overall, according to another CIA document released last week, "detainees in mid-2003 helped us build a list of 70 individuals -- many of who we had never heard of before -- that al Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations." In the War on Terror, learning these operatives' identities is almost the equivalent of the ULTRA program breaking German codes in World War II.

The former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson tells The Washington Post that "waterboarding and sleep deprivation were the two most powerful techniques and elicited a lot of information." Such extreme methods should obviously be used only in a carefully controlled setting against top detainees harboring information about ongoing plots. Detainees like KSM and a few of his confederates, who provided intelligence valuable enough to justify their harsh treatment.

Years of bombast and distortion have nonetheless killed the enhanced-interrogation program. The Obama administration has put the CIA out of the interrogation business and will henceforth endeavor to limit itself to the minimalist methods in the Army Field Manual. Thus it enshrines an interrogation regime that wouldn't have gotten KSM to cooperate so quickly, if at all. And turns its back on what worked.

Rich Lowry, NY Post, 9/2/09