The WaPo's fact-checker rules largely in favor of McCain.
We do not have enough information to make a definitive judgment. But it appears that Mukasey is straining to make a connection between the killing of bin Laden and the harsh interrogation techniques [sic] that appears, at best, tangential. Otherwise, he would not have had to resort to verbal sleight of hand to make his case. McCain, by contrast, appears to clearly connect the dots from the courier to bin Laden, citing information derived from conventional techniques. At the same time, while the enhanced techniques [sic] may not have provided the Rosetta stone to bin Laden’s whereabouts, Mukasey may be right when he asserts that valuable leads in the broader war against al-Qaeda were derived through these techniques.
Mukasey has now conceded that the name of OBL's courier did not initially come from torture, just that KSM's lies about the courier alerted the CIA to the significance of the name.
What I find interesting is Thiessen's assertion about the nature of the torture program. He claims it was not torture because the torture was not designed to elicit direct answers; it was designed to break the will of prisoners to lie by destroying their psyches and souls through physical and psychological terror. So they'd be tortured unti they broke down as human beings; then, after they had recovered from the repeated drowning, freezing, beating etc., they would become "compliant". Here's Thiessen's explanation:
McCain was briefed in detail more than once on enhanced interrogation [sic], so he knows full well that enhanced techniques [sic] were not used to gain intelligence from detainees — they were used to compel their cooperation. While applying enhanced techniques [sic], interrogators would ask detainees questions to which the interrogators already knew the answers, so they could judge when the detainees had made the decision to begin cooperating. Once they did so, the techniques stopped and the detainees moved into noncoercive debriefing.
One supposes this is designed to avoid the obvious point that prisoners tortured to give information often tell lies to get the torture to stop. But what Thiessen articulates is, in many ways, more disturbing.
What we are talking about is a system of violence and torture against whole swathes of prisoners to turn them into wreckages lacking human autonomy. The idea is that this makes them more likely to tell the truth because they have lost the will to resist. So Gitmo is really a camp designed to destroy human beings, not merely detain them, which was what Abu Ghraib revealed. Those techniques were not torture because the victims were not interrogated by Lynndie England. But she knew they were part of a process of human psychological destruction that would lead to interrogation. The point is that if you insert a period of time between the destruction of a person's soul and interrogation, you are not torturing even if you use established torture techniques used by barbaric regimes throughout the ages.
Questions immediately arise. Are all detainees at, say, Gitmo subject to these techniques routinely? That would be the natural inference. If this is how torture was used, isn't it light years' away from the initial "ticking time bomb" scenario – in fact, a complete rebuke to such a scenario? Thiessen, moreover, argues that you can tell when the prisoner is broken when you ask him questions to which you know the answers and he gives the correct response. So let's apply this to KSM, whose torture we have more specific evidence of than many. At what point during his 183 drownings did he give the right answer? Or was he never asked during the actual torture sessions, as Thiessen implies? In which case, why did they drown-and-rescue him 183 times and not, say, 150? And if the torture creates a broken soul that cannot lie, why do the torture defenders acknowledge that KSM lied to them long after the torture – which is what allegedly tipped them off to the salience of previous intelligence about the alleged courier? If he had been broken into compliance, why on earth did they believe he was lying?
If you think this is a moral and logical maze, you are correct. If this sounds like semantic word play against the clear evidence of what was done to human beings, you are correct. And if you believe that the US's reputation for torture spread far and wide among Jihadists and created many more would-be Jihadists than before, you are correct. Thiessen even brags about it:
The story of one senior al-Qaeda terrorist, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, illustrates the point. When Abd al-Hadi was brought to a CIA black site, agency officials told him, “We’re the CIA.” He replied, “I’ve heard of you guys. I’ll tell you anything you need to know.” And he did. Detainees like Abd al-Hadi cooperated without enhanced techniques because they feared enhanced techniques.
How is that not an admission of torture? What would be capable of instilling that kind of fear in a senior Qaeda terrorist if not torture? If "verschaerfte Vernehmung" only work through a relatively benign, non-criminal breakdown of a prisoner's psyche, rather than through the terror of the torture chamber, why was Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi so afraid?
It seems to me Thiessen is arguing one thing for domestic audiences and another thing for al Qaeda. Only one can be correct. I'd bet on the one he's bragging so disgustingly about.
The Dish 