Al-Qaeda, bin Laden, never imagined that the 3,000 people who lost their lives that day would inspire 3 million to put on the uniform and harden the resolve of 300 million Americans. They never imagined the sleeping giant they were about to awaken.

-- Vice President Joe Biden at September 11 commemoration (9/11/11)

Actually, that's precisely what bin Laden imagined: Al-Qaeda's central strategy was to draw its Western foes into economically ruinous wars in Muslim lands (Extra!, 7/11). But I suppose it would be bad form for journalists to raise this fact as the U.S. commemorates a decade of war and economic decline.

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."

In the end, we were able to track bin Laden because he communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers. And what was the source of this vital clue? The intelligence apparently came from detainees imprisoned in secret facilities overseas and subjected to what has been euphemistically called "enhanced" interrogation....

So the information from the detainees was crucial, and we face an uncomfortable irony, both political and ethical. The finest moment of Barack Obama's presidency to this point came about precisely because of the detention system against which he railed during his campaign. Indeed, the only slip in what was otherwise an exemplary performance on May 1 was the president's failure to credit his predecessor, who established the controversial mechanism that likely led us to bin Laden's door. If we are cheering bin Laden's death, then we are also cheering, whether we like it or not, the methods that brought it about.

Three cheers for torture--because the "vital clue" that "led us to bin Laden's door" was that he "communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers"? So without this "crucial" information, the U.S. government wouldn't have been looking for bin Laden's couriers? Or if it had found them, it wouldn't have realized they were important? Maybe it would have wasted time looking for couriers who were only children. "Bin Laden's door" it isn't.

Newsweek's rationale for cheering terrorism is no more convincing than the one advanced by Time (FAIR Blog, 5/6/11), which argued that the fact that detainees didn't give up any information about the courier under torture was key evidence that the courier was important.

One gets the sense that people who participated in torture, or helped to justify it--as Carter did in his book The Violence of Peace--recognize on some level that this was a horrible thing to do, and are desperate to assert that their moral collapse was not in vain.

Of course, those details have been substantially altered by the White House, if not scrapped altogether. And thus we started to see headlines like this one in the New York Times: "Raid Account, Hastily Told, Proves Fluid." As that story put it:

a classic collision of a White House desire to promote a stunning national security triumph--and feed a ravenous media--while collecting facts from a chaotic military operation on the other side of the world.

If by "classic," the Times means to say that the government often misleads or lies about its accomplishments--well, no argument here. And demonstrating their sense of humor, the Times account included this:

"There has never been any intent to deceive or dramatize," a military official said Thursday, asking that he not be named because of ground rules imposed by the Department of Defense. "Everything we put out we really believed to be true at the time."

We never meant to mislead anyone--but don't quote me on that!

Judging by what some reporters are saying,  early accounts are often simply wrong.  On CNN's Reliable Sources (3/8/11), host Howard Kurtz and former CNN Pentagon reporter Jamie McIntyre had this exchange:

KURTZ: And there was a conference call with White House officials, and you're trying to assemble as much as you can. You assume these people know what they're talking about.

MCINTYRE: But you know, Howard, this was an avoidable misstep, because anyone who has covered the military for any period of time, or anyone who is briefed on military operations, knows that initial details on an operation are almost always wrong. And if they had simply been cautious about caveating the fact that they didn't have all the details, or that they might change, and by the same token, if the reporters are careful to say in the past, we know that often these initial details are not right, it wouldn't have looked nearly as bad.

So reporters either "assume these people know what they're talking about," or just know that "initial details on an operation are almost always wrong." If it's the latter, it would seem to me that most reporters carry that knowledge around without sharing it with readers or viewers. In fact, a network correspondent once told me almost exactly the same thing that McIntyre is saying here. I remember being shocked, because the reporter's work betrayed no such skepticism towards official claims.

This was a well-planned assault, closely watched by elite planners at Washington. For reasons that are entirely  unclear, they delivered a highly misleading account to reporters and the public. They've made their corrections--or at least adjustments--but think about how often this might be happening, in Afghanistan or elsewhere. An airstrike reportedly kills civilians; the Pentagon issues a denial.  How often do reporters treat those denials with sufficient skepticism?