Washington Post Disgraces Itself With "Immoral & Irresponsible" Pro-Torture Article

[kpete]

WAPO Does Cheney's Dirty Work For Him

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/28/AR2009082803874_pf.html
How a Detainee Became An Asset
Sept. 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding

By Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 29, 2009

.....................

... the WaPo doesn't note that KSM went from capture to torture in a matter of weeks, so any claim that he was uncooperative--weighed against two years of rapport-based interrogation--is completely bogus.

Ultimately, though, what the WaPo shows is that KSM immediately offered up some information,

*** KSM almost immediately following his capture in March 2003 elaborated on his plan to crash commercial airlines into Heathrow airport

Gave false information under torture...

***"During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time," he said.

And gave false information after torture.

*** One former agency official recalled that Mohammed was once asked to write a summary of his knowledge about al-Qaeda's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. The terrorist group had explored buying either an intact nuclear weapon or key components such as enriched uranium, although there is no evidence of significant progress on that front

"He wrote us an essay" on al-Qaeda's nuclear ambitions, the official said. "Not all of it was accurate, but it was quite extensive."

This article is fundamentally immoral and irresponsible. The WaPo had an opportunity to show the progression of KSM's treatment: almost immediately to torture, then to rapport, and after that, helpful though still not entirely reliable contributions. Showing such a progression would actually help the WaPo and its readers to make sense of this so-called "irreconcilable" problem by seeing, first of all, that CIA didn't try other methods with KSM until after he had been tortured and that it was months and years of rapport, not the torture, most closely tied to his cooperation.

more:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/08/29/the-wapo-declares-itself-unable-to-find-the-truth/