How to Lose Arguments And Alienate Readers

Waterboarding is back in the news. It turns out that a strong case can be made that prisoners subjected to Bush-era enhanced interrogations gave info that ultimately led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. CIA director, Leon Panetta, was asked about this last night on the CBS Evening News. Here is the relevant part of the transcript:

COURIC: Having said that, some valuable information did, in fact, come from enhanced interrogation techniques.

PANETTA: Obviously there was- there was some valuable information that was derived through those kinds of interrogations. But I guess the question that everybody will always debate is whether or not those approaches had to be used in order to get the same information. And that, frankly, is an open question.

As Panetta says: whether we absolutely needed enhanced interrogations can't be proved. Maybe we didn't need any interrogations? Maybe Bin Laden would have eventually turned himself in? Who knows? But, facts are facts. We did use enhanced interrogations, and "valuable information" was obtained. Enter the New York Times, which has a cover story today obfuscating the issue:

But a closer look at prisoner interrogations suggests that the harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier and exposing his hide-out. One detainee who apparently was subjected to some tough treatment provided a crucial description of the courier, according to current and former officials briefed on the interrogations. But two prisoners who underwent some of the harshest treatment — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times — repeatedly misled their interrogators about the courier’s identity.

So what? We already know that not everything a prisoner says should be believed. The interrogations produced good info and bad - but the good info led to Bin Laden.  It doesn't mean that the techniques played a "small role at most." The paragraph is a smokescreen. Here's more:

Glenn L. Carle, a retired C.I.A. officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002, said in a phone interview Tuesday, that coercive techniques “didn’t provide useful, meaningful, trustworthy information.”

I'm sorry if it didn't work for Carle in 2002. Leon Panetta, who opposes enhanced interrogations, admits they helped here. No one ever said they work every time.

Here's another non-sequitor from the Times report:

“The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003,” said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council. “It took years of collection and analysis from many different sources to develop the case that enabled us to identify this compound, and reach a judgment that Bin Laden was likely to be living there."

That is not the bottom line. Enhanced interrogation helped, even if it didn't produce a "smoking gun." It doesn't have to produce a "smoking gun" to be useful.

There are barbaric techniques I would not approve of, even if they produced reliable intelligence. I have lines. Waterboarding doesn't cross my lines. If it offends the Times, they are entitled to make the case why. This is not the way to go about it.

Panetta said waterboarding worked here, but we might have gotten the info through other means. That's an intellectually honest position. Why is the Times entering the debate a day later insisting it doesn't work? That is an easy way to lose needed credibility, and the debate.