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Even before the Aug. 24 release of the 2004 CIA inspector general's report revealed the full extent of harsh methods used on terror detainees, much of the furor over the agency's enhanced interrogation techniques has been over questions of morality, legality and politics. But there's also a cold, practical question: Did harsh methods like waterboarding cause terrorist suspects to give up valuable, actionable information? (Read "Five Questions for the CIA IG's Interrogation Report...
...April, after the Obama Administration released the Bush Administration's so-called torture memos, which provided the legal rationale for the tactics, Cheney demanded that it also release two CIA memos that, he said, would "show the success of the effort." Those memos, taken together with the unclassified inspector general's report into the CIA's interrogation program, would be the smoking gun that proved, once and for all, that harsh interrogation paid...
...inspector general's report says it "did not uncover any evidence that these plots were imminent." The CIA memos say information gained from detainees led to "arrests [that] disrupted attack plans in progress" - but stop short of attributing this directly to the enhanced interrogations...
What makes a definitive analysis difficult is the fact that the inspector general's report and both memos are, despite their declassification, still substantially redacted. One consequence is that it is hard to establish timelines: for instance, how much information did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provide before he was waterboarded, and how much afterward? (Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times, Zubaydah 83 times and Nashiri twice.) (Read "How Waterboarding Got Out of Control...
Another, more fundamental question hard to answer with certainty is whether the interrogators needed to use harsh techniques at all. The inspector general's report says that at least in some instances, they were used "without justification." Even interrogators in the field worried that their bosses' "assessments to the effect that detainees [were] withholding information [were] not always supported by an objective evaluation, but are too heavily based, instead, on presumptions of what the individual might or should know." But ultimately, the conclusion of the inspector general's report in this regard is not, well, particularly conclusive: "The effectiveness...