WaPo story outlines KSM’s interrogation

A fascinating if somewhat contradictory story in today’s Washington Post outlines the information Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided to U.S. intelligence officers after being subjected to various enhanced interrogation techniques.

On the one hand, the story seems to support the claims of those like Dick Cheney who support the use of waterboarding and other coercive techniques. For example:

These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.

[snip]

The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general’s report and other documents released this week indicate.

Yet on the other hand, consider these fairly substantial caveats:

Mohammed, in statements to the International Committee of the Red Cross, said some of the information he provided was untrue.

“During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time,” he said.

Supporters of enhanced interrogation technique are seizing on the story to bolster their argument. For example, see Stephen Hayes’s Weekly Standard post this morning.

For the opposite opinion, see Glenn Greenwald’s take-down of the piece at Salon.