Water-Bored

Al-Qaida’s plot to bomb the Library Tower was not worth torturing anyone over.By Timothy Noah

The Library Tower? Is that the best that Bush’s torture apologists can do?

     On April 16, the Obama administration publicly released four Justice Department memos, now repudiated, in which President George W. Bush’s administration defined the parameters of what it termed, euphemistically, "enhanced interrogation techniques." This has enlivened the debate about whether water-boarding, walling, Room 101-ing and whatever other torture methods the Bush-era CIA may have used against al-Qaida captives actually prevented acts of terror. Various journalists (Ron Suskind, the Washington Post‘s Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, the New York Times‘ Scott Shane) have looked into Bush administration claims that water-boarding Abu Zubaida, the first "high-value" captive, yielded vitally important information, and concluded it did not. We have since learned that Abu Zubaida was water-boarded 83 times. ABC News reported a couple of years ago that water-boarding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was what prompted him to confess, "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the American Jew, Daniel Pearl." That same report claimed Sheikh Mohammed had been water-boarded only once, an estimate we now know was off by 182. The confession may have been shaky, too. Bernard-Henri Lévy, among others, doubts Sheikh Mohammed killed Pearl. In any event, confessing to past murder had no obvious bearing on future acts of violence.