IQ matters

Spotted on Steve Sailer's blog:

 

The irony about general intelligence is that ordinary folks of average intelligence recognize its variance across people, its generality across domains, and its importance in life. Yet educated elites meanwhile often remain implacably opposed to the very concept of general intelligence, and deny its variance, generality, and importance. Professors and students at elite universities are especially prone to this pseudohumility. They socialize only with other people of extraordinarily high intelligence, so the width of the whole bell curve lies outside their frame of reference. I have met theoretical physicists who claimed that any human could understand superstring theory and quantum mechanics if only he or she was given the right educational opportunities. Of course, such scientists talk only with other physicists with IQs above 140, and seem to forget that their janitors, barbers, and car mechanics are in fact real humans too, so they can rest comfortably in the envy-deflecting delusion that there are no significant differences in general intelligence.

Even within my own field, evolutionary psychologists tend to misunderstand general intelligence as a psychological adaptation in its own right, often misconstruing it as a specific mental organ, module, brain area, or faculty. However, it is not viewed that way by most intelligence researchers who, instead, regard general intelligence as an individual-differences construct—like the constructs "health," "beauty," or "status." Health is not a bodily organ; it is an abstract construct or "latent variable" that emerges when one statistically analyzes the functional efficiencies of many different organs. Because good genes, diet, and exercise tend to produce good hearts, lungs, and antibodies, the vital efficiencies of circulatory, pulmonary, and immune systems tend to positively correlate, yielding a general "health" factor. Likewise, beauty is not a single sexual ornament like a peacock's tail; it is a latent variable that emerges when one analyzes the attractiveness of many different sexual ornaments throughout the face and body (such as eyes, lips, skin, hair, chest, buttocks, and legs, plus general skin quality, hair condition, muscle tone, and optimal amount and distribution of fat). Similarly, general intelligence is not a mental organ, but a latent variable that emerges when one analyzes the functional efficiencies of many different mental organs (such as memory, language ability, social perceptiveness, speed at learning practical skills, and musical aptitude). ...

In the 1970s, critics of intelligence research such as Leon Kamin and Stephen Jay Gould wrote many diatribes insisting that general intelligence had none of these correlations with other biological traits such as height, physical health, mental health, brain size, or nerve conduction speed. Mountains of research since then have shown that they were wrong, and today general intelligence dwells comfortably at the center of a whole web of empirical associations stretching from genetics through neuroscience to creativity research. Still, the anti-intelligence dogma continues unabated, and a conspicuous contempt for IQ remains, among the liberal elite, a fashionable indicator of one's agreeableness and openness.

Yet this overt contempt for the concept of intelligence has never undermined our universal worship of the intelligence-based meritocracy that drives capitalist educational and occupational aspirations. All parents glow with pride when their children score well on standardized tests, get into elite universities that require high test scores, and pursue careers that require elite university degrees. The anti-intelligence dogma has not deterred liberal elites from sulking and ranting about the embarrassing stupidity of certain politicians, the inhumanity of inflicting capital punishment on murderers with subnormal IQs, or the IQ-harming effects of lead paint or prenatal alcoholism. Whenever policy issues are important enough, we turn to the concept of general intelligence as a crucial explanatory variable or measure of cognitive health, despite our Gould-tutored discomfort with the idea.

You've probably heard that IQ tests are now widely considered outdated, biased, and useless, and that there's more to cognitive ability than general intelligence—there are also traits like social intelligence, practical intelligence, emotional intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. Strikingly, these claims originate mostly from psychology professors at Harvard and Yale. Harvard is home to Howard Gardner, advocate of eight "multiple intelligences" (linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist). Yale is home to Peter Salovey, advocate of emotional intelligence, and was, until recently, home to Robert Sternberg, advocate of three intelligences (academic, social, and practical). (To be fair, I think the notions of interpersonal, social, and emotional intelligence do have some merit, but they seem more like socially desired combinations of general intelligence, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and/or extraversion, than distinctive dimensions that extend beyond the Central Six.)

Is it an accident that researchers at the most expensive, elite, IQ-screening universities tend to be most skeptical of IQ tests? I think not. Universities offer a costly, slow, unreliable intelligence-indicating product that competes directly with cheap, fast, more-reliable IQ tests. They are now in the business of educational credentialism. Harvard and Yale sell nicely printed sheets of paper called degrees that cost about $160,000 ($40,000 for tuition, room, board, and books per year for four years). To obtain the degree, one must demonstrate a decent level of conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness in one's coursework, but above all, one must have the intelligence to get admitted, based on SAT scores and high school grades. Thus, the Harvard degree is basically an IQ guarantee.

Elite universities do not want to be undercut by competitors...

Same-Sex Marriage at the Corner

Notes from The Corner:

 

William C. Duncan:

The Scottish government has just published a report called "The Experiences of Children with Lesbian and Gay Parents." The Iowa Supreme Court and other advocates of same-sex marriage have touted "social-science evidence" in support of their conclusion, so this report is timely.

It examines only eight studies. None dealt with child outcomes such as school success, delinquency, etc. Instead the focus was on household dynamics and perceptions of parents' orientation. The report notes that only two studies employed a comparison group, five used "volunteer-based convenience samples," and all the studies relied "heavily or exclusively on self-reported data."

The section titled "Advantages of having a Lesbian or Gay Parent" identifies two. One study concluded children of lesbian mothers "felt they had developed a greater awareness of prejudice and a wider acceptance of diversity, especially with regard to sexual orientation." (Next report: Children of Latter-day Saints are less likely to believe that Mormons are a dangerous cult.)

Maggie Gallagher reports on some poll results:

the folks at Quinnipiac released a poll showing that when offered three choices (gay marriage, civil unions, or no recognition)  just 33 percent of Americans support gay marriage — the same as last month's CBS News poll, using the same question.

They can't both be right. 

Quinnipiac also found that on a straight-up "Would you support or oppose a law in your state that would allow same-sex couples to get married?" question, Americans oppose gay marriage 55 percent to 38 percent.

 

Weekly Standard on Interrogation

Steven Hayes notes the Obama Administration is confused:

The president says harsh interrogation techniques "do not make us safer," but his top intelligence adviser says the same techniques produced "high-value information" that gave the U.S. government "a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country."

Obama White House officials routinely boast that theirs is "the most transparent administration in history," but then they release Justice Department memos about the interrogations in which the assessments confirming the value of those techniques are blacked out.

Attorney General Eric Holder tells a congressional committee that he is unaware of memos about the information gleaned in harsh interrogations that have been requested by former Vice President Dick Cheney, but his boss, the president, not only knows about those memos but also describes their contents to members of Congress.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says the administration could support an independent investigation of interrogation techniques based on the 9/11 Commission. Then he says that Obama decided long ago that such an investigation would be too political.

Such evidence of confusion is abundant. But nowhere is it more pronounced than on the question of possible criminal prosecutions related to coercive interrogations. Administration officials, including the president, have gone out of their way to leave open the possibility of prosecuting those responsible for the interrogation techniques.

Noemey Emery thinks "truth commission" hearings are a good idea:

Let's tell the truth about Bush's conduct of the war on terror, which is that it's been a success. His ultimate legacy hasn't been written--Iraq is improved, but not out of danger--but the one thing that can be said without reservation is that the country was kept safe. He delivered on the main charge of his office in time of emergency, in a crisis without guidelines or precedent. Attacks took place in Spain, and in London, in Indonesia and India, but not on American soil, which was the obvious target of choice. Bush couldn't say this before he left office, for obvious reasons, and after he left, attention switched to the new president. This little fact dropped down the memory hole, but with all this discussion, it will rise to the surface. Let the hearings begin!

Also dropped down the memory hole--along with the names of all the Democrats who thought Saddam was a menace who cried out for removal--is what the ambience was like in late 2001 and 2002, when fears of anthrax and suitcase bombs ran rampant, and people on all sides tried to seem tough. Let's tell the truth about all the liberals who went on record supporting real torture, not to mention the Democrats in Congress, when it was cool to want to seem tough on our enemies, who couldn't be too warlike. Then war and tough measures stopped being cool, and "world opinion" became more important. Nothing like statements under oath to revive ancient memories! And rewind the tapes.

Let's get at the truth too about the word "torture," which to different people, means different things. Some think "torture" means standing on the 98th floor of a burning skyscraper and realizing you have a choice between jumping and being incinerated.

William Kristol notes the "dark period" in American history has not been our conduct of the war, but may yet take place in our investigation.

"We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history," President Obama said when he ordered the release of the Justice Department interrogation memos. Actually, no. Not at all. We were attacked on 9/11. We responded to that attack with remarkable restraint in the use of force, respect for civil liberties, and even solicitude for those who might inadvertently be offended, let alone harmed, by our policies. We've fought a war on jihadist terror in a civilized, even legalized, way. Those who have been on the front and rear lines of that war--in the military and the intelligence agencies, at the Justice Department and, yes, in the White House--have much to be proud of. The rest of us, who've been asked to do little, should be grateful.

The dark and painful chapter we have to fear is rather the one President Obama may be ushering in. This would be a chapter in which politicians preen moralistically as they throw patriotic officials, who helped keep this country safe, to the wolves, and in which national leaders posture politically while endangering the nation's security.

Indeed.  From the outset, we've been careful to avoid the sort of large-scale retaliation against Arabs and Muslims that could easily have taken place, and that would have taken place in many countries.  For all the cries of "Islamophobia", there has been almost no real "Islamophobia" to be found.

But Robert Ringer's "You Won't Get Credit For It Theory" seems to apply.  It must be awfully tempting to show people what a real civil rights violation would look like. 

And it's vital to prevent the next 9/11 attack.  After a second one, the country may not be nearly as restrained as it's been.

Jim Manzi opposes waterboarding

But he also recognizes it's a complicated problem.

Any decent society needs to defend itself from armed aggression without becoming a society not worth defending. This is never simple to accomplish.

I assume that only a true ideologue would dispute that there is at least some possibility of obtaining at least some militarily-useful information if we applied this technique to many captured combatants. The fact that it keeps being reinvented or rediscovered in various wars, and used repeatedly over time in these conflicts by troops that want to win, is excellent circumstantial evidence that it provides at least some tactical benefits. It is very hard to assess rationally how much incremental tactical benefit it has provided, and by extension, could realistically be expected to provide in the future, since it is generally conducted in secret, is part of a broader intelligence and action program and many of its successes would presumably be calamities that were avoided.

The simplified case that waterboarding is categorically evil goes something like this.

“Applying extreme coercion to a human being when he is entirely in your power is inherently evil. This is why, like most universally-recognized evils, torture is done in dark, hidden places. Those who skillfully do interrogations on our behalf – doing difficult work in the worst conditions – have refused to waterboard. You sit in safety, unwilling to actually pour water down the throat of a human while he gags, struggles and thrashes in agony strapped to a table 36 inches from you; instead you write words that egg on the worst among us. If you can not see that torture is wrong, you live in a different moral universe than I. You’re a monster.”

The simplified case that waterboarding is not inherently evil goes something like this.

“We live in a violent world. While there must be limits to what we do to defend ourselves, simply describing the unpleasantness of waterboarding doesn’t cut it. We must do lots of terrible things to other human beings during war in order to prevent yet-worse things from happening. Inducing fear in a manner carefully calculated not to produce physical harm is not torture, and is very, very much less severe than most things done in war. Your supposedly refined moral sentiments are vanities; failure to consider bad versus worse consequences of our actions is the real abdication of moral reasoning in an environment of extreme violence. You live in a bubble that must be protected by methods that you find distasteful, without confronting the fact that if we were to follow your scruples, evil men would rule and do far worse things. You’re a child.”

This deep moral disagreement of course creates the practical political problem of how to reconcile these conflicting views.

Here are the modern conflicts in which, to my knowledge, waterboarding is believed to have been used as a widespread technique to gain intelligence from captured combatants over a sustained period and area of operations by non-U.S. powers:
....
Do you notice a pattern? These are either dictatorial regimes, or actions of basically democratic governments in arenas of imperial border occupation. For a democracy, waterboarding is a corruption of empire.

This also doesn’t mean that I think waterboarding is always wrong. What should a U.S. citizen, military or civilian, do if faced with a situation in which he or she is confident that a disaster will occur that can only be avoided by waterboarding a captured combatant? Do it, and then surrender to the authorities and plead guilty to the offense. It is then the duty of the society to punish the offender in accordance with the law. We would rightly respect the perpetrator while we punish him. Does this seem like an inhuman standard? Maybe, but then again, I don’t want anybody unprepared for enormous personal sacrifice waterboarding people in my name.

Tendentious Redefinition

Dafydd at Big Lizards says about torture what Dennis Prager has been saying about rape.

If "rape" is defined as meaning any unwanted sexual advances, what word do you use for actual violent rape? And if torture is any unwanted treatment, what word do you use for what Al Qaeda does to its captives?

All right; that's what the word torture means. In that case, what word do we use for gang raping women, stoning people to death, lopping off limbs, shoving a cattle-prod up a prisoner's anus, cutting off a captive's nose and ears, gouging out his eyes, and finally beheading him -- on video?

Just tell me what word I'm supposed to use for all that, if the word "torture" now means making him stay awake past his beddie-bye time. G'wan, I double-dog dare you.

This is my pet peeve, Argument by Tendentious Redefinition, in a nuthatch. It's structurally identical to those ultra-radical feminists who defined all heterosexual sex to be "rape"... then accused nearly every man of being a rapist. "Reagan was a rapist! Bush is a rapist! Cheney is a rapist!" Yep, every last one of them has had sex with a woman... so by the tendentious redefinition of "rape," each and every one of these men is a rapist!

So if playing "good cop, bad cop" with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed now constitutes "torture," then I guess every policeman who ever interrogated a suspect is a torturer or torture enabler. Voilà -- we are all Nazis on this bus. Lt. Tragg is now Reich Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels.

Another effect of this mode of argument: If we're all rapists, rape isn't a big deal. And if we're all torturers, torture isn't all that bad.

Cheney on interrogation

Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former Vice President, holds her own very nicely in a TV interview.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

If the left equates Dick Cheney with Darth Vader, does that make his daughter Princess Leia?

A Whitworth conservative's lament

Whitworth, where conservatives are assumed to be stupid and mean.

For four years at Whitworth I have remained apolitical for the sake of peacekeeping, my own sanity and conflict avoidance. I’ve sat amongst friends while they called members of my own ideology retarded, racist, Nazi, uneducated, uninformed, morally inferior, anti-feminist, elitist and many other less than pleasant names.

Since I am from Alaska, almost everyone I know pestered me about Sarah Palin and Ted Stevens during last year's elections. They would ask me where I'm from in Alaska, in the hopes that my answer would be Wasilla and that I would join them in the glee of bashing her. They would start a long-winded speech about how Palin loves shooting wolves from airplanes for sport, how she's ignorant because people claimed she said she could see Russia from her house and how Stevens is an ancient, corrupt politician who deserves to be hung out to dry.

After a while I just stopped responding to their questions. I stopped answering, not because I didn't have answers to their claims, but because they wouldn't ask me about Palin or Stevens for my insight or opinion. They asked me simply as a precursor to judging and bashing these people and issues.

The intolerance for any viewpoint other than their own was so impassioned that it was hard at times to be cordial while spending time with them. They were my friends, though, my closest friends. They spent hours loathing the intolerance of some fundamentalists, never stopping to think that being intolerant of those who are intolerant is still intolerance.

I am conservative. I am educated, I am not racist, I am not anti-feminist, nor am I any of the other things they claim that members of my ideology, and thus myself, are. The characterization of conservatives as mindless drones does nothing for this country except keep genuine debate from occurring between opposing views.

....

In all my years at Whitworth, the most closed-minded and intolerant people I’ve met were those claiming to be the exact opposite. They did not think introspectively about ideas different than their own, they discarded them as loony and stupid, not even worthy to be entertained by their far superior mindsets. It was an elitism the likes of which I have never experienced in any other group of people.

So what does he think did happen?

Richard Nadler writes at The Corner at NRO:

But two events in the 20th century vitiated his grand designer-less design. The development of magnification revealed the teaming complexity of microbiology, rendering the visual appearance of morphological similarity irrelevant. To a Darwinian originalist, the photoreceptor cell might, by the complexifying adaptations of experience, evolve into a pinhole-camera eye; to the a 20th-century microbiologist, this is as absurd as the creator-less evolution of a Harley into a Prius. 

But Charles might find equal distress in neo-Darwinism, which displaced the logical (but untrue) adaptations of Lamarck with the random failures of Medelian genetics. Where the former had explained the modification of species as congruous with the changes wrought by physical forces on insensate matter, the Mendelian system enshrined the opposite: the systematic resistance of species to change outside a limited range of characteristics. Larmarck's hyposthesis assisted Darwin's vision; that of Mendel and Huxley retarded it. 

The "weaknesses" and "holes" in evolution have turned out to be fleeting.  They tend to last only until researchers turn their attention to them.  The blood clotting cascade was supposed to defy evolutionary explanation, and then it was explained.  The same is true for the flagellum, and most of the other "problems for evolution".  Given this track record, any argument that depends on some phenomenon resisting explanation is not one I'd want to rely on.

But I'd love to know one thing.  Does Mr. Nadler believe life arose and developed in defiance of natural law?  If so, he's left the realm of science.

It all needs to be on the table

Jerry Pournelle has written on what he calls the "Voodoo sciences", and the popular confusion between data and evidence.  Both sides on the interrogation debate are offering their evidence supporting their conclusions.  If we're going to have an honest inquiry, we need all the information on the table, not just whatever evidence happens to support your preferred side.

In the debate that has erupted on enhanced interrogation techniques since Barack Obama released the OLC memos, we have demanded an honest debate with all of the information on the table.  I've linked to the CIA standing by its action and the results, Dennis Blair's memo to Obama (which Obama had redacted to water down) calling the interrogations successful, and Pete Hoekstra's demand to get the Congressional briefings released to show the approval from key Democrats and Republicans.

To get the whole story, though, everything should be on the table — including personal testimony from a man who was present at some of the interrogations.  Ali Soufan represented the FBI in the Abu Zubaydah interrogations, and he objected to it during the interrogations and afterwards as well.  Soufan explains that he felt they could get the necessary information from Zubaydah without waterboarding (via Howard Kurtz):

Pruden on the Interrogation Witch Hunt

Wes Pruden writes at the Washington Times:

The president's on-again, off-again, maybe-he-will and maybe-he-won't decision to punish someone who loosened tongues of Islamist terrorists at Guantanamo suddenly threatens not only the CIA interrogators and Justice Department lawyers, but even members of Congress. Maybe it won't stop there: if the lawyers who offered legal opinions are at risk of punishment for their legal advice, why not the members of Congress who knew what was going on? Why not the secretaries who typed up the transcripts? Why not the interns who fetched the coffee? All were accessories either before or after the fact.
....

Perhaps the president imagines that nobody cares much about what happens to lawyers, but he has set in motion something neither he nor anyone else can control. Some of the Democrats in Congress, eager now to join the mob, will regret what they cry for. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, for one, was a member of the House intelligence committee and sat in on super-secret briefings after Sept. 11. She concedes that she heard about waterboarding but she doesn't remember exactly what she heard. Just like Barack Obama sleeping through 20 years of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's rabid sermons, Ms. Pelosi dozed through the briefings. Her colleagues on the intelligence panel say they remember her demanding that the CIA do more to get the "intelligence" to prevent another attack.

Republicans in the Senate, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are finally finding their voices. So is Joe Lieberman, a courageous Democrat. If we're going to have hangings, Ms. Pelosi may be at risk of becoming our most famous female hangee since Mary Surratt paid her debt at the end of a rope for hanging out with John Wilkes Booth.

LOL Graphs

Graphs with tongue in cheek.

When Show Trials Begin...

It used to be that in a Western democracy, you could lose an election without having to worry about losing your freedom, or your livelihood. Now our President is thinking of investigating the lawyers who wrote the memos on enhanced interrogation methods. This will have the effect of criminalizing the offering of legal advice, and sends a signal throughout the government that they can be second-guessed after any subsequent change of power or policy.

Byron York interviews Ted Olson on the fallout he sees coming from these show trials:

Perhaps more than anyone in Washington today, Theodore Olson knows the dangers of the path the Obama administration is traveling on the question of Bush-era terrorist interrogations.
....
In the 1980s, Olson was the subject of controversy over advice he had given, as the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, to President Reagan on a question of constitutional privileges. His position angered Democrats in Congress, and for his troubles, Olson became the target not only of Capitol Hill investigations but a long independent counsel probe. A politically charged issue that should never have been investigated in the first place turned into a years-long nightmare.
....
Now, the president's decision to release confidential Justice Department memos on the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on a small number of al-Qaeda operatives has again set the Washington investigation machine in motion.

"It seems irrational and incomprehensible to me," Olson told me this week. "They have started something they can't stop, now that it's out. And what conceivable good can it do?"
....
As we talked, Olson ticked off what might lie ahead. If there is a 9/11-style commission, prospective members will have to be found, appointed, vetted, cleared of conflicts of interest, given security clearances -- and that's just for the eminences on the panel. Full-time staff will have to be recruited, and they will go through the same sort of scouring. Then commission will have to find office space and a SCIF. (For those unfamiliar with Washington security culture, that's a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility -- a totally sealed room for the handling of the most highly classified information.) There will be hearings, and subpoenas, and witnesses, and draft reports and final reports.

"And then," Olson added, "if they do that, many people are going to say you can't stop with John Yoo or Alberto Gonzales. You're going to have to investigate every member of Congress who was briefed on this, what their notes were, what records they kept, who they talked to. You're going to have to investigate leaks that implicate the press, who told what to whom. There's no foreseeable limit to how far they're going to have to go."

And that's before we get to potential prosecutions, separate investigations by various congressional committees, lawsuits in civil courts, bar association probes, and possible legal tribunals around the world.

And then -- well, why stop at the memos? "If it's prosecutable because we waterboarded somebody or deprived him of sleep, what about sending a drone to blow him up without a trial or a hearing?" Olson asked. "What if the person we blew up was carrying a three-year old child? We know things like that have happened. We know innocent people have been killed. We know this administration has done it. Are they going to be prosecuted for that?"

And finally, when everyone is finished investigating, what's to stop the next president from holding Obama administration officials "accountable" for some "controversial" action?

Olson sees one way this could be ended. A President would have to stand up and end it. For the sake of the Union, he would declare, this must not happen. Maybe one will.

The other option will keep show trials from popping up every time power changes hands. It's simply to so arrange things that power never again changes hands.

Drawing lines on Torture

Torture, as are any number of things, is a question of line-drawing. Jim Manzi explores this fact at some length at NRO.

 

And in this post, Jim Manzi points out that KSM was subjected to 183 pours of water over his face, not 183 sessions of waterboarding.

A blue ribbon commission?

That's one suggestion at NRO by Cliff May:

This more serious thought has occurred to me since writing my column: Why not set up a truly blue-ribbon panel to review all relevant interrogation techniques and then report to the president which are effective?

Then the president can indicate which of these effective techniques:

1. we never do, no matter what (because they "shock the conscience" and therefore constitute torture under American law);
2. we will only do in the most extreme circumstances and under specific presidential authority;
3. the DNI may authorize on his own under approved guidelines;
4. SOP for all qualified CIA interrogators;
5. SOP for all military interrogators (e.g. the Army Field Manual).

Isn't that the way to strike a balance?

Of course, then the Obama Administration would be on the record, and would have to throw a lot more stuff down the memory hole before changing its mind.

About the Library Tower Plot...

Just One Minute:  The timeline problem with the Library Tower Plot:
If enhanced interrogation techniques were what allowed us to break up the Library Tower plot, there's a problem with the timeline.

What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument), is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast."  These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.

The analysis follows:

Well, I suppose it is possible that the underlying CIA memo is false - it is described in the May 30 memo as the being authored by [redacted] at DCI and is titled "Re: Effectiveness of the CIA Counterintelligence Interrogation Techniques", March 2, 2005.  Maybe we are being subjected to a bit of bureaucratic chicanery in which the CIA lies to the DoJ in order to protect its own turf and its own people - a bit of the old CYA at the CIA, if you will.

But it seems like a rather bold and unnecessary lie - the author did point to other less ambiguous successes, such as intel from Khalid Sheik Mohammed that led to the arrest of Hambali of the Jemaah Islamiyah, the group responsible for the Bali bombings and others, and Admiral Blair is the latest to admit that the enhanced interrogation program scored some successes.  Trying to sneak the old "We busted him in 2003, thereby disrupting a plot in 2002" time-travel scam past the DoJ might have been risky if the secret eventually got out, as it did a year later when Bush declassified some details of the incident.

So let's imagine for a moment that the CIA document is the truth.  Do we have to stretch any other facts very far to accommodate that?  Not really.  What Ms. Townsend said (link provided by Mr. Noah) in briefing the incident was that

The cell leader was arrested in February of 2002, and as we begin -- at that point, the other members of the cell believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward.

Let's review basic operational security - if KSM had a back-up team, would these four know about it?  Or, if KSM put together a new team after these four were busted, would they know it?  Why would they?

And why would KSM give up on crashing a plane into Los Angeles?  He was involved in the 1995 plan to blow up twelve airplanes over the Pacific; he wanted to attack the West Coast on 9/11; and he did help launch the scheme disrupted here.  Why would he lose interest in attacking the West Coast after that setback in 2002?

The documents that would clear this up remain hidden.

In any case I am sure Mr. Noah will join the calls for President Obama to end the politicization of the intelligence and release the memos which provide the other half of the debate.  The OLC memos tell us what we did; what has not been released are the memos telling us why we did it.  And if the CIA was lying to the DoJ, let's find out.

BONUS GUESS:  If the 'Effectiveness' memo and its counterparts concluded that the enhanced interrogation techniques were valueless, I think Obama would have released them, said "I told you so", and lauded the CIA for honestly confronting its past mistakes.  A win-win!

More NRO posts on torture

The US did not execute Japanese for waterboarding.  The cases where Japanese torturers were charged (not necessarily executed) involved a lot more than waterboarding, and a form of "waterboarding" much more dangerous than what is approved by the CIA.

 

A reader on SERE vs. interrogations.  Detainees have the power to stop rough treatment.  They can cooperate.

 

Jonah Goldberg notes it would be nice if the people debating whether torture works would define "torture" and "works".  Something I've been saying for a while.

 

Rich Lowry amplifies: we're not a torturing nation.

 

A letter sent to Ramesh Ponnuru:

One phrase from the letter: "It is one sad thing that various contributors to the Corner are open consequentialists who believe good enough ends justify evil means."

What, exactly, is an "evil means"?

 

Charles Krauthammer believes this whole document release fiasco will wind up in Truth Commissions.

An adage the intelligence and law enforcement agencies may be taking ever more to heart:  He who does nothing does nothing wrong.

Do we want our guardians doing nothing?

 

Jim Manzi points out that in contests between the US and nations that engage in systematic torture, we keep winning.  That in itself is reason to eschew torture.  (Whatever that works out to mean.)

Death for the Pirate?

Beldar writes about the apparent mistakes in the reporting about the one surviving pirate involved in the M/V Maersk Alabama, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse.  It seems he's eligible for harsher punishment than the news media seem to believe.

This NYT story — like every other mainstream media report I've seen since the attempted hijacking and hostage-taking — again incorrectly claims that life imprisonment is the most severe penalty available for any of the crimes with which Muse has been charged. As I wrote last week, 18 U.S.C. § 1203(a) provides that "if the death of any person results, [hostage-taking] shall be punished by death or life imprisonment." The statute doesn't require that the defendant himself have committed the homicide, nor that the victim of the homicide be one of the hostages. Rather, as with many state felony murder laws, all that section 1203(a) literally requires is that the hostage-taking have resulted in "the death of any person" for its violation to become a capital crime punishable by death. The criminal exposes himself to this penalty by taking part in a crime which ends up getting anyone killed as a result, even if it's an innocent bystander killed by accident, or even if it's one of his accomplices and co-conspirators who's killed in a justifiable homicide by law enforcement officers.

I think torture trials are a great idea.

Hugh:  I think putting members of the last administration on trial for torture is a great idea!

 

Once members of the Bush administration are on trial, let them issue subpoenas for all the notes and recordings made of a certain meeting where the Senators in attendance voiced the conceren that the methods described weren't harsh enough. 

 

And while we're at it, let's compel those Senators to testify, under oath, in open court, to precisely what they did say, and what they meant by it.

 

...........Karl Lembke

Banned techniques worked

At least according to Obama's intelligence director.  From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON – President Obama's national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

"High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa'ida organization that was attacking this country," Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

Apparently, the Washington Post can claim "no significant plots" were uncovered, and ignore any other useful information (like locations of bases and lairs, and names of other operatives) that actually is uncovered.

Did "torture" work?

Those who argue against waterboarding make the claim that "torture never works", and that people will say whatever the interrogator wants to hear, just to make it stop.  Terry Jeffrey has a piece up at Townhall.com that begs to differ:

As CIA Acting General Counsel John A. Rizzo explained in a 2004 letter to then-Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the CIA would only resort to waterboarding a top al-Qaida leader when the agency had "credible intelligence that a terrorist attack is imminent," "substantial and credible indicators that the subject has actionable intelligence that can prevent, disrupt or deny this attack" and "(o)ther interrogation methods have failed to elicit the information within the perceived time limit for preventing the attack."

....

On Tuesday, the CIA confirmed to me that it stands by assertions credited to the agency in this 2005 memo that subjecting KSM to "enhanced techniques" of interrogation -- including waterboarding -- caused him to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to stop a planned 9/11-style attack on Los Angeles.

....

After he was waterboarded, KSM provided the CIA with information that allowed the U.S. government to close down a terror cell already "tasked" with flying a jet into a building in Los Angeles.

"You have informed us that the interrogation of KSM -- once enhanced techniques were employed -- led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles," says the memo, referring to information CIA provided to Justice.

....

"More specifically, we understand that KSM admitted that he had (redaction) large sum of money to an al-Qaida associate (redaction) ... . Khan subsequently identified the associate (Zubair), who was then captured," said the memo. "Zubair, in turn, provided information that led to the arrest of Hambali. The information acquired from these captures allowed CIA interrogators to pose more specific questions to KSM, which led the CIA (to) Hambali's brother, al-Hadi. Using information obtained from multiple sources, al-Hadi was captured, and he subsequently identified the Garuba cell. With the aid of this additional information, interrogations of Hambali confirmed much of what was learned from KSM."

A CIA spokesman confirmed to me on Tuesday, as I first reported on CNSNews.com, that the CIA stands by the factual assertions made here.

Those who oppose the use of enhanced interrogation techniques claim, despite this, that the techniques are torture, and "torture doesn't work".  If the CIA says these techniques work, they must be lying.  Go figure.