Sunday, July 19, 2009

About those interrogations

From Powerline:

Earlier this year, the Washington Post proclaimed, in a story by Joby Warrick and Peter Finn, that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of the harsh interrogation of detainee Abu Zubaida. I took on that article here.

Today Warrick and Finn are back to give us what they call a "more nuanced look" at the interrogation of Abu Zubaida. As Marc Thiessen shows, this more nuanced look amounts to something close to a retraction of the authors' claim that no significant plot was foiled as a result of this interrogation.

In today's piece Warrick and Finn report that Abu Zubaida gave up information that led to the arrest of Jose Padilla. He did so, moreover, only after he was subjected to sleep deprivation. Thiessen points out that this reporting directly contradicts the claim of FBI agent Ali Soufan that he got the information about Padilla from Zubaida before enhanced interrogation techniques were applied by the CIA.

There are those who still make the blanket statement, "torture doesn't work".

Sleep deprivation works.

Therefore, it's not torture.

QED.

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