USA Today weighs in today (5/10/11) on the argument that U.S. torture of detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was instrumental to tracking down Osama bin Laden. Like other outlets, the newspaper does a pretty lousy job of summarizing the evidence.

Under the headline "Raid Renews Debate on Interrogations," reporter Oren Dorell suggests this starting point:

But the revelation that tips prodded from captured Al-Qaeda members subjected to "enhanced interrogations" led to the capture of Osama bin Laden has ignited a debate over whether Obama should revisit the policies he cast aside.

There is no strong evidence that torture "led" to any such thing. But that's the starting point for the paper's discussion, with the first quote coming from Bush torture lawyer John Yoo. The piece then quotes National Security Council spokesperson Michael Vietor saying, "There's no way that information obtained by EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques] was the decisive intelligence that led us directly to bin Laden." That would seem to undercut the premise of the discussion USA Today has set up. Not to worry--they line up four former Bush officials to endorse the argument that torture worked (Michael Mukasey, Richard Perle, Michael Hayden and former CIA official Jose Rodriguez).

Readers then hear from two former interrogators--Glenn Carle and Matthew Alexander--who do not think torture works. That is quickly countered by former Bush official Marc Theissen. And then readers get a quote from Ken Gude of the liberal Center for American Progress, who is a proponent of both sleep-deprivation and U.S.  drones in Pakistan.

That's not much of a "debate":  a slew of torture proponents, a few critics, and a flawed understanding of the facts that are known.

On the paper's editorial page, John Yoo gets more space to push for torture. That is supposed to "balance" the paper's editorial, which isn't exactly anti-torture:

Opponents of torture responded by trying to downplay the importance of those techniques to the bin Laden raid. They continued to argue that torture doesn't work and is never justified.

If only the answers were so simple or morally unambiguous. They aren't.

They add:

It's clear that torture played some role in piecing together the chain of information that led to bin Laden's lair in Pakistan. CIA Director Leon Panetta acknowledged as much. But he went on to muddy the waters, leaving unclear whether the information obtained by torture was indispensable or just a small factor in a sea of data investigators were dissecting.

Waiting for the head of the CIA to issue a clear explanation of CIA activities seems rather absurd.

The best case that torture proponents can muster is that some people who were tortured issued misleading denials that, many years later, led in some fashion to obtaining the actually useful information used to track down Osama bin Laden. As one L.A. Times article put it, "none of the three most critical pieces of information--the courier's name, the area of Pakistan in which he operated and the location of the compound in which Bin Laden was living--came from detainees." But that doesn't stop outlets like USA Today from presenting the supposed fact that torture "led" to bin Laden's killing as a "revelation."

Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed columnist Harold Jackson (5/20/09) writes that most of those who have criticized his paper for hiring of pro-torture lawyer John Yoo as his colleague "have their facts wrong."
After making a gratuitous swipe at bloggers ("who never let the facts get in the way when they're trying to whip people into a frenzy to boost website hits"), Jackson gets down to specifics: "To set the record straight, no one tried to hide Yoo's becoming a regular columnist," he declares. If that's the case, why isn't Yoo listed on the Inquirer's website along with its other regular columnists?

That seems to be the one specific fact that the critics got "wrong," actually. The rest of the column is a defense of the Inquirer's judgment in hiring Yoo to "counter criticism that our editorials and columns always lean left," and to "make sure our pages present alternative points of view."

It's kind of funny, the line about countering criticism--the whole point of the column is that the paper's gotten a lot of criticism about hiring Yoo, but the response to that criticism is not to hire someone representing the critics' point of view, but to tell them to stop reading blogs.

In point of fact, the Inquirer's columnists do not all represent the left. In addition to Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator who got 16 percent of the Philadelphia vote in his last election, the lineup also features Kevin Ferris, who writes his own defenses of torture and condemns Barack Obama's "Dangerous Naivete in Foreign Policy." And Michael Smerconish, a more moderate conservative who has filled in as a substitute host for Bill O'Reilly and Joe Scarborough.

There's five other columnists listed by the paper, all with backgrounds in corporate journalism. Some of them are mildly liberal; none of them are likely to be mistaken for I.F. Stone. Certainly none of them are prominent figures in progressive politics, a left-wing counterpart to Santorum.

And who would be the left-wing counterpart to Yoo, exactly? Bill Ayers? That's unfair to Ayers, whose actions, however reckless, didn't end up killing anybody.

This is the trouble with treating Yoo as someone who merely "provide[s] the catalyst for intelligent discourse": Torture is illegal under U.S. law and a violation of the U.S. Constitution. And, despite the indignation Jackson seems to feel over the "very pleasant" Yoo being called a "war criminal" by emailers, it's classified as, yes, a war crime by international law.

When influential institutions treat those responsible for such things as worthy experts, society risks losing things even more valuable than "thoughtful conversation."

Blogger and Philadelphia Inquirer writer Will Bunch has a review (Attytood, 5/11/09) of how, "by late last year, the world already knew a great deal about John Yoo, the Philadelphia native and conservative legal scholar whose tenure in the Bush administration as a top Justice Department lawyer lies at the root of the period of greatest peril to the U.S. Constitution in modern memory":

It was widely known in 2008, for example, that Yoo had argued for presidential powers far beyond anything either real or implied in the Constitution--that the commander-in-chief could trample the powers of Congress or a free press in an endless undeclared war, or that the 4th Amendment barring unreasonable search and seizure didn't apply in fighting what Yoo called domestic terrorism.

Most famously, Yoo was known as the author of the infamous "torture memos" that in 2002 and 2003 gave the Bush and Cheney the legal cover to violate the human rights of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, based on the now mostly ridiculed claim that international and U.S. laws against such torture practices did not apply. Working closely with Dick Cheney, Cheney's staff and others, Yoo set into motion the brutal actions that left a deep, indelible stain on the American soul.

Bunch notifies us that, despite all this, his "colleagues upstairs at the Philadelphia Inquirer--with none of the fanfare that might normally accompany such a move"--decided "to sign a contract with Yoo in late 2008 to give him a regular monthly column." Bunch explains that the paper "thus handed Yoo a loud megaphone on what was once a hallowed piece of real estate in American journalism--to write on the very subjects that have now led Justice Department investigators to reportedly recommend disbarment proceedings against Yoo."

"First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully."

--The official position of the U.S. government from October 23, 2001 until October 6, 2008

Why do I get the impression that this was seen as a feature, not a bug?