Documents discovered in Libya suggest a close relationship between the Libyan government and the CIA. The New York Times described it this way on September 3:

TRIPOLI, Libya -- Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya's former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service -- most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country's reputation for torture.

And then today (9/6/11) the Times put it this way:

The cooperation appeared to be far greater with the American intelligence agency, which sent terrorism suspects to Libya for questioning at least eight times, despite the country's reputation for torture. Britain sent at least one suspect, according to the documents.

As  Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Twitter (in fewer characters), the whole point of rendition was to send prisoners to countries the United States knew would treat them a certain way. It wasn't a series of accidents. In other words, the CIA used Libya not despite its reputation for torture, but because of it.

The answer might depend on which media outlet you rely on.

I read the headline at Democracy Now! on Friday:

"Justice Dept Drops 99 of 101 Cases Against CIA for Abuse and Torture"

The New York Times, on the other hand, offered a different sort of emphasis:

"U.S. Widens Inquiries Into 2 Jail Deaths"

If you feel like there hasn't been enough attention paid to the fact that the democratic movements in the Arab world are undermining the power of U.S. elites to have troublemakers tortured and/or killed, rest assured that Newsweek's Christopher Dickey has you covered this week (6/12/11):

Among American spies there’s more than a little nostalgia for the bad old days. You know, back before dictators started toppling in the Middle East; back when suspected bad guys could be snatched off a street somewhere and delivered to the not-so-tender mercies of interrogators in their home countries; back when thuggish tyrants, however ugly, were at least predictable.

It’s not a philosophical thing, just a practical one. Confronted by the cold realities of this year's Arab Spring, many intelligence and counterterrorism professionals now see major dangers looming near at hand, while the good news--a freer, fairer, more equitable and stable Arab world--remains somewhere over the horizon. "All this celebration of democracy is just bullshit," says one senior intelligence officer who's spent decades fighting terrorism and finds his job getting harder, not easier, because of recent developments. "You take the lid off and you don’t know what's going to happen. I think disaster is lurking."

Dickey uses Egypt as one example, explaining that at one point dictator Hosni Mubarak was making plans to hand over power to feared intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. The U.S. supported that idea, but Egyptians weren't especially keen on handing over power to Mubarak's torture chief. Losing this vital link is apparently bad news for U.S. policymakers--though Dickey undercuts the point when he recalls this history:

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."

The argument that the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden shows that George W. Bush's torture policies were justified got another rehearsal in Newsweek from Yale professor Stephen Carter (5/5/11):

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.

It's bad enough that corporate media are having such an ill-informed debate about whether torturing some prisoners helped find Osama bin Laden. But considering whom the media invite to this debate, it's probably not a surprise. Take yesterday's Sunday shows (please!).

On NBC's Meet the Press, Obama national security adviser Thomas Donilon basically refused to take a definitive position on torture, waterboarding and intelligence.  "No single piece of intelligence led to this," was his line. They followed up with a segment with former CIA head Michael Hayden and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom basically endorsed the idea that torture worked.

On CBS's Face the Nation, Donald Rumsfeld declared that these tactics worked.

Fox News Sunday had an "exclusive" with Dick Cheney, which followed a pretty contentious interview with Donilon. Cheney did not surprise.

On ABC's This Week, torture advocate Liz Cheney was on the roundtable to say exactly what you'd expect.  ("That debate is over. It worked. It got the intelligence. It wasn't torture. It was legal.")  This came after host Christiane Amanpour seemed to overstate the White House's view, saying that that Obama officials have admitted that waterboarding "did, in fact, yield fruitful information in the hunt for Osama bin Laden."

But give ABC credit for having a  critic of torture on their show.  Former Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks said this:

I never thought I'd live in a country where we would debate whether we should endorse torture as an official policy. Was some information obtained through torture? Probably yeah. Could it have been obtained through more professional methods the intelligence professionals recommended? Almost certainly yes. We could have gotten it sooner and better.

Also, what we know is that the use of torture became the prime recruiting tool for Al Qaida and for insurgents in Iraq, and so directly resulted in the death of American troops.

Time magazine's new issue (no link to the text is available) includes this weird explanation of how torture helped track down Osama bin Laden:

Interrogators grilled 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed for details about the courier. When he pleaded ignorance, they knew they were on to something promising. Al-Libbi, the senior Al-Qaeda figure captured in 2005, also played dumb. Both men were subjected to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, including, in Mohammed's case, the waterboard.

As best I can tell, the argument here is that they got no information about the Al-Qaeda courier from torturing these two detainees--which was just the crucial lead needed to crack the case. So the fact that torturing these two detainees did not produce information proves that torturing is a useful way to produce information.

The piece goes on to say, "The report that Mohammed and al-Libbi were more forthcoming after the harsh treatment guarantees that the argument will go on." Does that make any sense at all? Or is this just more evidence that anything and everything can be used by torture proponents to claim vindication?

Marcy Wheeler's coverage of this discussion at FireDogLake has been excellent, and seems more to the point:

But there are two points that seem key in assessing the torture question. First, both KSM and al-Libi had critical intelligence they withheld under torture. KSM knew of Abu Ahmed's trusted role and real name; al-Libi knew Abu Ahmed was OBL's trusted courier and may have known of what became OBL's compound.

And neither of them revealed that information to the CIA.

They waterboarded KSM 183 times in a month, and he either never got asked about couriers guarding OBL, or he avoided answering the question honestly. Had KSM revealed that detail, Bush might have gotten OBL eight years ago.

One other consideration--raised by Matthew Alexander on CounterSpin--is that the courier's nickname allegedly offered by Khalid Sheik Mohammed was probably not all that helpful. Indeed, a Los Angeles Times article (5/5/11), based on interviews with various government officials, makes this point:

They stressed that 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.

OK, this isn't Sean Hannity's byline in the Post today, but it might as well be. The headline should stop you:

In bin Laden Victory, Echoes of the Bush Years

The piece--actually written by Scott Wilson and Anne Kornblut--lays out the argument:

As President Obama celebrates the signature national-security success of his tenure, he has a long list of people to thank. On the list: George W. Bush.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Bush waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication. Public tolerance for military operations over the past decade has shifted to the degree that a mission carried out deep inside a sovereign country has raised little domestic protest.

And a detention and interrogation system that Obama once condemned as contrary to American values produced one early lead that, years later, brought U.S. forces to the high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and a fatal encounter with an unarmed Osama bin Laden.

So not only did torture work, but the illegal, baseless war against Iraq "forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication."  In other words, the Iraq War led to catching bin Laden. This could give Fox News a new theme to pound for the next couple of days.

Will Ferrell did a one-man show at the end of the Bush years, in his W. character, called "You're Welcome, America." It was pretty funny. This is not.

The Washington Post yesterday (2/13/11):

Mubarak Resignation Throws Into Question U.S./Egyptian Counterterrorism Work

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 13, 2011; A01

For decades, Egypt's government has been a critical partner for U.S. intelligence agencies, sharing information on extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and working hand in glove on counterterrorism operations. Now the future of that cooperation is in question.

That "work" and "cooperation" includes, among other things, rendition and torture.

It'd be more helpful if this were made clear from the outset, instead of being mentioned in the 11th paragraph of the story.

The White House position on Egypt would seem to back the transfer of some level of official power to Omar Suleiman, who Hosni Mubarak recently named vice president. Suleiman's former role as intelligence chief made him a key player in Egypt's use of torture, against Egyptian citizens and in connection with CIA-backed rendition.

That part of the story hasn't received enough media attention, but today the New York Times does a great job, splashing the story on the front page.... sorry, that's not right. It must be here somewhere.

Perhaps a stinging editorial denouncing torture... no, that's not it.

OK, here we go.

It's a letter to the editor from writer, lawyer and activist Marjorie Cohn.

To the Editor:

Re “West Backs Gradual Egyptian Transition” and “Blood on the Nile” (Week in Review, Feb. 6):

The United States government, which sends $1.5 billion annually to Egypt, refuses to learn that supporting vicious dictators is counterproductive.

Washington is backing Vice President Omar Suleiman, who is fiercely loyal to President Hosni Mubarak, to lead the transition team. But the vast majority of Egyptians who have taken to the streets to demand Mr. Mubarak’s ouster would not likely accept a Suleiman-led government.

The former intelligence chief worked with the Central Intelligence Agency when it rendered terrorism suspects to Egypt for torture. As your reporters who were interrogated by Egypt’s secret police, Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish, vividly point out, torture is commonplace in Egyptian prisons. Mr. Suleiman is closely identified with the government’s longstanding policy of torture.

What happens next in Egypt is up to the people there, not the United States government. Until we stop backing tyrants and torturers, we and our allies will suffer the consequences.

Marjorie Cohn
San Diego, Feb. 6, 2011

The writer, a law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is editor of “The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse.”

The civilian trial of terrorism suspect Ahmed Ghailani, who was linked to the U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, was unsatisfying to those who believe that accused terrorists should not be tried in civilian courts. To them, the scoreboard tells the story: Ghailani was convicted on one count, and acquitted on over 280 other charges.

The newspaper headlines today lay out the problem:

USA Today (11/19/10):

Detainee's Acquittals Spark Debate Over Civilian Trials

Washington Post (11/19/10):

Verdict in Terror Case a Setback for Advocates of Civilian Trials

A more rational media system would discuss the verdict primarily as a result of the U.S. government's decision to torture detainees like Ghailani, who has been held at "black sites" and Guantanamo Bay. As Glenn Greenwald noted (Salon, 11/18/10):

Last month, the federal judge presiding over the case, Lewis Kaplan, banned the testimony of a key witness because the government under George Bush and Dick Cheney learned of his identity not through legal means but instead by torturing (and also possibly coerced the testimony of that witness).

The manner in which the government pressed the case against Ghailani was closely linked to these torture allegations. It's hard to have a serious conversation about the case without acknowledging this. And the fact that the trials excluded evidence allegedly obtained through torture is, as Greenwald argued, proof that the justice system was functioning properly.

Back in June, a study by Harvard students (echoing earlier work in Extra!--5-6/08) found that media outlets like the New York Times consistently called things like waterboarding torture when they reported on them--that is, until the Bush administration's torture came to light. The study sparked a lot of discussion, with the Times responding that it didn't refer to waterboarding as torture because it wanted to avoid "taking sides in a political dispute."

In today's New York Times (11/3/10), a review of George W. Bush's new book shows that the Times is sticking with that formula:

He likewise defends his decision to authorize harsh interrogation techniques on captured terror suspects. When the CIA asked him if they could subject Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the September 11 mastermind, to a form of simulated drowning called waterboarding, he writes that he said, "Damn right." The interrogations, he adds, "saved lives."

So Bush's admittedly cavalier attitude towards torture is still not a reason to call it torture.

A study (4/10) by Harvard students discovered that waterboarding was commonly called torture by major newspapers--right until the United States was found to be practicing it. The study looked at coverage in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal.

As Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it, "We don't need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task:  Once the U.S. government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term."

The Harvard research has been widely discussed, which is certainly a good thing. Michael Calderone at Yahoo! has even managed to get the Times to respond, with a spokesperson for the paper saying that the Times "has written so much about the waterboarding issue that we believe the Kennedy School study is misleading." Whatever that means.

It's important to note for the record that the Times was called out on this in real time by FAIR. After one of the first major Times pieces addressing U.S. torture practices (5/13/04), we issued the Action Alert "'Harsh Methods' Aren't Torture, Says the New York Times," which pointed out:

The May 13 article, headlined "Harsh CIA Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogation," described "coercive interrogation methods" endorsed by the CIA and the Justice Department, including hooding, food and light deprivation, withholding medications, and "a technique known as 'water boarding,' in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown."

The article took pains to explain why, according to U.S. officials, such techniques do not constitute torture: "Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees."

The Times actually responded, with public editor Daniel Okrent more or less in agreement with FAIR's position.  When he asked Times editor Craig Whitney about the failure to call torture "torture," he replied, "Now that you tell me people are reading things into our not using 'torture' in headlines, I'll pay closer attention."

FAIR also pointed out in its response to the Times that the failure to use the term torture was only part of the problem:

And FAIR's complaint was not simply that the Times did not use the word ''torture'' describe these interrogation methods (such as prolonged submersion), but that it quoted without rebuttal administration assertions that this was not torture, and seemed to echo these assertions in the reporters' own voice.

FAIR's magazine Extra! pointed out (5-6/08) that the term "waterboarding" seemed to come into play only in order to find an appropriate euphemism for what papers previously called "torture":

Indeed, a search of newspaper archives reveals that until May 2004, the term had actually meant an aquatic sport similar to surfing. Meanwhile, the technique now known as "waterboarding"--in which the person being tortured is actually drowning, aspirating fluid to the point of being unable to breathe--had previously been called "water torture," or simply "torture," by the media.

This Washington Post headline (2/13/10) caught my eye:

2008 Habeas Ruling May Pose Snag as U.S. Weighs Indefinite Guantanamo Detentions

You have to read the piece somewhat closely to understand what they're taking about. The terrorism case against one Guantanamo detainee was "ironclad" until a federal judge deemed it "too weak"--because some of the statements against the defendant had been "coerced." This has happened repeatedly--judges "'have gutted allegations and questioned the reliability of statements by the prisoners during interrogations and by the informants." This is bad news, we're told; "the government is likely to suffer further losses" in court.

You have to read almost to the end of the piece before you get a more direct view of things:

The government also relied on Hatim's interrogations and his testimony at military hearings, during which he is said to have admitted to training at an Al-Qaeda military camp. Judges have been skeptical of such statements unless the government provides evidence that the men were not seriously mistreated. In Hatim's case, the Justice Department did not dispute his contention that he was tortured in U.S. custody and that he made those admissions to avoid further mistreatment.

The government is trying to justify holding prisoners indefinitely based on evidence gleaned from torture. That is the "snag" referenced in the headline.

Seeing all the press attention given to pitbull-fighter and NFL star Michael Vick's return to football, David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 8/19/09) can't help but think that Vick

should have tortured humans instead of dogs. Then we would have been told to overlook it for the sake of moving forward. Better yet, he should have killed humans rather than only torturing them. Then we would have been told next to nothing about it at all. It might have been reported, but it wouldn't have become a hot topic, an echo-chambered story to be dismissed only after a great deal of hand-wringing. It certainly would not have interfered with watching football games.

For those of his readers who may be "severely satire-impaired," Swanson explains that "No, I don't support harming dogs. No, I don't really want people tortured," but instead is simply "concerned" over how U.S. media "worry about our souls because of mass-torture, whereas mass-murder doesn't seem to gain the same coverage in our corporatized communications system."

"Of course I want torture prosecuted," Swanson writes, "but torture is a symptom. The illness is aggressive war."