Wallace, Sammon cite dubious Washington Post article to defend Cheney, enhanced interrogation

From Glenn Greenwald's August 29 Salon.com blog post:

What makes the Post's breathless vindication of torture all the more journalistically corrupt is that the document on which it principally bases these claims -- the just-released 2004 CIA Inspector General Report -- provides no support whatsoever for the view that torture produced valuable intelligence, despite the fact that it was based on the claims of CIA officials themselves.  Ironically, nobody has done a better job this week of demonstrating how true that is than the Post's own Greg Sargent -- who, in post after post this week -- dissected the IG Report to demonstrate that it provides no evidence for Cheney's claims that torture helped obtain valuable intelligence. 

That the released documents provide no support for Cheney's claims was so patently clear that many news articles contained unusually definitive statements reporting that to be so.  The New York Times reported that the documents Cheney claimed proved his case "do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness."  ABC News notedthat "the visible portions of the heavily redacted reports do not indicate whether such information was obtained as a result of controversial interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding."  TPM's Zachary Roth documented that "nowhere do they suggest that that information was gleaned through torture," while The Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman detailed that, if anything, the documents prove "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."  As Sargent reported, even Bush's loyal Terrorism adviser, Frances Fargos Townsend, admitted that the IG Report provides no basis for what the Post today is ludicrously implying:

It's very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it's not clear when techniques were applied vs. when that information was received. It's implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the - the - the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn't say that.

Yet The Post today publishes a long, breathless story that, in reality, does little more than claim that (a) Khalid Sheik Mohammed was subjected to "the CIA's harshest interrogation methods" (not "torture," of course) and (b) at some point after that, he provided valuable intelligence.  At best, it's nothing more than a statement of obvious chronology, not causation.  Nonetheless -- faithfully employing the same semantic game Cheney used to obfuscate chronology and causation, which Sargent first highlighted --The Post loudly and unmistakably suggests that it was the torture that caused the waterfall of life-saving intelligence, and repeatedly grants anonymity to "intelligence officials" to claim this is so, notwithstanding the complete absence of any evidence for such claims and the ample evidence, as the Post's own Sargent documented, proving this to be untrue.

The debate over whether torture extracted valuable information is, in my view, a total sideshow, both because (a) it inherently begs the question of whether legal interrogation means would have extracted the same information as efficiently if not more so (exactly the same way that claims that warrantless eavesdropping uncovered valuable intelligence begs the question of whether legal eavesdropping would have done so); and (b) torture is a felony and a war crime, and we don't actually have a country (at least we're not suppoesd to) where political leaders are free to commit serious crimes and then claim afterwards that it produced good outcomes.  If we want to be a country that uses torture, then we should repeal our laws which criminalize it, withdraw from treaties which ban it, and announce to the world (not that they don't already know) that, as a country, we believe torture is justifiable and just.  Let's at least be honest about what we are.  Let's explicitly repudiate Ronald Reagan's affirmation that "[n]o exceptional circumstances whatsoever . . . may be invoked as a justification of torture" and that "[e]ach State Party is required [] to prosecute torturers."

But sideshow or not, media outlets ought to exercise at least the most minimal amount of mental thought and skepticism before passing on baseless, anonymous claims that Torture Works and Saves Lives.  It's long been clear that most of our establishment media believes in torture -- that's why there was so little outcry from them when the torture regime was implemented and why they're yet again reacting with horror over the prospect of accountability.  As a result, they are now eager to argue it worked in order to justify not only what Bush officials did, but also their own complicity in it. 

The Post article today is one of the most astoundingly vapid and misleading efforts yet to justify torture -- a true museum exhibit for the transformation of American journalism into little more than mindless amplifiers for those in power.  It simultaneously touts facts as new revelations that have, in fact, long been claimed (that KSM provided valuable intelligence), while deceitfully implying facts that are without any evidence whatsoever (that he did so because he was tortured).  Dick Cheney couldn't have said it better himself.  It's so strange how often that's true of The Liberal Media.