KSM: I Lied To Stop Torture

By Steve Hynd

Yet more evidence that torture doesn't work because even when the victim squawks, they'll say anything to just stop the torture.

"I make up stories," Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA concerning the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. "Where is he? I don't know. Then, he torture me," Mohammed said of his interrogator. "Then I said, 'Yes, he is in this area.' "

Mohammed also appeared to say that he had fingered people he did not know as being Al Qaeda members in order to avoid abusive treatment. Although there is no way to corroborate his statements, Mohammed is one of the militants whom the CIA repeatedly subjected to the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The Bush administration's torturers also mistook a low-level fixer for Al Qaeda's al-Qaeda's chief of operations, and later apologized to him...after torturing him. That man, Abu Zubaida , was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House and remains the most cited individuals in defenses of Bush-era torture.

These revelations come from fragments of CIA documents ordered released by a Federal judge. But as Dan Froomkin notes:

nothing in the newly un-redacted portions supports the earlier, Bush-era decision to keep them secret. And there are still vast portions being kept from the public -- now by the Obama administration -- for what look like equally specious reasons.

As I wrote last week, President Obama appears to be blatantly violating his promise not to "protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrassment to the government." And as I wrote yesterday, his position appears to be rooted not in legitimate national security concerns -- nor even in misplaced loyalty to holdovers in his administration -- but in the cold miscalculations of his political advisers.

What makes them miscalculations is the near-certainty that, bit by bit, most of this stuff will come out eventually. Whether that happens thanks to Obama or despite his willing and active participation in a cover-up is the only thing that's really in doubt.

The only sentence I'd disagree with is the last one. Obama seems to have been entirely captivated by the privilege, literally private law, of being President and is engaged in as wide a variety of cover-ups and kneejerk secrecy demands as his predecessor.