Breaking News: Anonymous former officials provide unsubstantiated reports that torture provided unspecified intelligence value

The next time someone complains to you about there being an awful liberal bias in the media, remember this Washington Post article from Saturday, which will certainly do its part to make it appear that the debate over whether torture works is as lively as ever. See, this is how it works - one day, an Inspector General report comes out which says explicitly that no conclusions can be drawn from the available evidence that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" were effective in the cases of Abu Zubayda and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. The report is painstakingly detailed, the result of actual investigative reporting inside the agency, and comes with as clear an authority as one is likely to receive. (It was written under the Bush administration, for those suspicious of trickery.) The day after the report comes out, the people who advocated the policy simply assert that not just that the conclusions of the report are false, but that the report itself says exactly the opposite of what it does. That's enough for the public and the media to consider the matter "unsettled". Then, as a follow-up, the second largest paper in the country reports as front page news that some of the people who could be facing indictments over the subject (but who won't identify themselves in any case) recall that at some unspecified point after torture was perpetrated on the terrorists, they began to talk about all manner of interesting things, saving lives in the process. They even title the piece "How a Detainee Became an Asset". Liberal bias indeed.

First - it's time for serious journalists in this country to stop accommodating the anonymous providing of information. Not only do we not have any idea who the people are, and what relationship to the facts they actually have, but it's a good bet that they're the ones potentially facing indictment in John Durham's upcoming investigations. Does the Post really think it "broke a story" here, when all it looks like they did was write down what other people told them to say? Do they even mention the reason these folks might have to flat out lie?

Second - even if you accept as fact everything that the anonymous officials got the Post to transcribe, what it shows is not that torture worked, but rather that some information was gained after torture. Nothing in the story tells you anything about whether it was the torture that made the difference, whether the information was accurate and comprehensive, whether other methods could have been tried first, or anything of value whatsoever. And yet, the title of the piece makes the conclusion for you - How a Detainee Became an Asset.

Here's the sum total of the argument, from the Post piece:

"What do you think changed KSM's mind?" one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding. "Of course it began with that."

Of course. Muckrake on, Washington Post.

In the weekend's other example of crack journalism, Chris Wallace interviewed Dick Cheney himself on the torture investigations, and foreign policy in general, even giving the veep a chance to plug his new book while he's at it. I can't sum this up any better than Andrew Sullivan, who compares Wallace to a teenage girl interviewing the Jonas Brothers.

Later today: What if Cheney's right, and torture does actually work?