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.

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"

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:

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."