Torturing the truth

Once again, the Washington Post tries to convince us that Dick Cheney saved the world by authorizing the torture of Khaled Sheik Mohammed.

"KSM, 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intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete," according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA's then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department.

"What do you think changed KSM's mind?" one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding. "Of course it began with that."

The WP does acknowledge that KSM later told the Red Cross that he came up with false info -- saying whatever the interrogators seemed to want to hear -- in order to make the torment stop.

Here's an important nugget quoted in an earlier Cannonfire post on this topic:

Khaled Shiekh Mohammed (after being waterboarded) confessed to planning a terror attack against Washington State's Plaza Bank, which was not founded until 2006 -- well after his capture.

I should clarify the chronology. The waterboarding took place in 2003. The "revelation" about the Plaza Bank popped in KSM's 2007 testimony at a hearing held in Gitmo. I don't know what caused him to say such a thing; the waterboarding was, at that point, far in the past. Was he tortured again? Or did he simply decide to play games with his captors?

Marcy Wheeler reminds us of previous reports which revealed that the more useful results came about through "rapport-based interrogation." The WP neglects to mention that. (Marcy also details the chronological flim-flammery in the WP piece.)

There was also another factor at work: Forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner, who has studied KSM's testimony (and who seems to be on the right), believes that KSM might have been motivated not so much by waterboarding as by threats to his family. (Apparently, the family was scooped up in Pakistan at roughly the same time that KSM was captured.) Welner:

Mr. Mohammed expresses greater concern with the notion of his and other children being locked up than he does his own treatment.

The WP doesn't mention that, either.

Nevertheless, the Weekly Standard applauds the WP story in a piece titled "Acknowledging the Obvious." The piece quotes CIA Inspector General John Helgerson thus:

"Certain of the techniques seemed to have little effect, whereas waterboarding and sleep deprivation were the two most powerful techniques and elicited a lot of information," he said in an interview with the Post.

When the CIA talks, watch the wording. We see nothing in this quote about the quality of the info -- just the quantity. Nothing in the WP article undermines my long-held suspicion that these techniques are used not to uncover hidden facts, but to make someone "confess" to whatever the interrogators want to hear.

Conceivably, torture can be used to hide certain inconvenient truths. Allow me to repeat points made in that earlier post:

KSM was privy to much important data -- data which may have been lost forever after his mind was transformed into something approximating Gerber's mush.

For example, he might have been able to explain why his former roommate and fellow terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad (who helped come up with the Bojinka scheme) received flight training at Richmor aviation -- a CIA connected firm accused of participating in "extraordinary rendition." Richmor also owned the Gulfstream II jet used in one the great "coke jet" mysteries we've looked at in the past.

I'd like to ask KSM about that, if KSM were still in his right mind. Why that flight school?

Also, what of the reports placing KSM in Paraguay?

There have been persistent reports that one trainer of the 9/11 hijackers, Omar Saeed Sheikh, worked for British intelligence. I'd like to ask KSM if he knows anything about that, too.

And just what was KSM's relationship with Mehmood Ahmad Mehmood, the former head of Pakistani intelligence (and still a powerful figure in that country)?

I'm reminded of the Nosenko affair. Yuri Nosenko was held in extremely rough detention not to make him talk but to make him cooperate. There's a difference.