It's now on the front burner, the question I alluded to yesterday morning of whether the US's torture techniques produced any results. The Times led this morning with an analysis piece by Scott Shane digging into the matter of whether Dick Cheney's claims have any merit to them. These two grafs sum matters up pretty well:
Many intelligence officials, including some opposed to the brutal methods, confirm that the program produced information of great value, including tips on early-stage schemes to attack tall buildings on the West Coast and buildings in New York's financial district and Washington. Interrogation of one al-Qaeda operative led to tips on finding others, until the leadership of the organization was decimated. Removing from the scene such dedicated and skilled plotters as Mr. Mohammed, or the Indonesian terrorist known as Hambali, almost certainly prevented future attacks.
But which information came from which methods, and whether the same result might have been achieved without the political, legal and moral cost of the torture controversy, is hotly disputed, even inside the intelligence agency.
Which information came from which methods seems a pretty crucial thing to learn. Also, the question of how far along these "schemes" were. Was the threat against these West Coast buildings real, or just some madman's crazy dream?
Remember, we learned after 9-11 that we get raw intel about threats all the time, on a daily and even hourly basis, and the job of intelligence professionals is to assess whether those threats seem real (you know, like the one the Bush administration was warned about in August 2001 and ignored because Don Rumsfeld was busy building missile-defense and John Ashcroft was fighting pornography).
I have trouble imagining that Cheney is just lying through his teeth. Not because I think Dick Cheney would lie to us. I pretty clearly don't think that. But it's just a matter of self-preservation. That is, if there were absolutely no documentation buttressing his argument, why on earth would he be going so far out on a limb?
And then, of course, there's the question of whether flouting international law in so brazen and distasteful a fashion was worth it even if it turns out that there's some evidence to support Cheney's claims.
