For almost ten years now, a small group of highly-placed men have repeatedly claimed that the U.S.'s counterterrorism victories have owed to getting rough with terror suspects during interrogations. They have come forward again, in the wake of bin Laden's death, to carry the banner of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' (EITs). But reports from CIA operatives, actual interrogators close to events, investigative journalists and national security experts in and out of the Bush and Obama Administrations have consistently cast doubt on or entirely debunked these claims. And to date, no hard evidence has demonstrated their truth value.

The stakes of the so-called "torture debates" involve much more than the prestige of the debaters, or even the moral and legal impacts of the policies in question. If EITs do not work, or counterproductively heighten detainee's resistance, or garner misleading and distracting information, policymakers need to understand that and invest more heavily in interrogation approaches that actually give us the information we need to duplicate the kinds of operations that found bin Laden.

A Connection Between EIT's and Bin Laden's Death?
Before any details were known about how U.S. counterterrorism agents tracked down Osama bin Laden; before anyone could have made any informed judgment about whom exulting Americans should thank for the banishment of their collective bogeyman, Dick Cheney, his daughter, Bill Kristol, Peter King, John Yoo, Karl Rove, and others in or close to the former Bush Administration already knew who deserved the credit: the Bush Administration officials and supporters who had the grit, foresight, and nerve to institute and publicly support EITs. As Cheney put it to Fox News before details were clear, "I would assume the enhanced interrogation program we put in place produced some of the results that led to bin Laden's ultimate capture."

John Yoo, a former Bush Administration lawyer, and one of the legal architects of the enhanced interrogation program, was not so circumspect as to use the word 'assume.' He closed his Wednesday Wall Street Journal opinion editorial on the bin Laden capture with the suggestion that President Obama "acknowledge his predecessor's role in making this week's dramatic success possible ... and restart the interrogation program that helped lead us to bin Laden."

The champions of EITs reported, through various media, that CIA officials learned about bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) who had undergone EITs during his detention. For these EIT advocates, early accounts suggesting KSM had provided any information about bin Laden's courier offered proof enough that it was the waterboarding that had made bin Laden's death possible (not any other interrogation tactic used by the skilled and sophisticated men and women comprising KSM's team of interrogators).

But over the last two days, more details have been clarified. First, it became clear that KSM did not offer useful information about al-Kuwaiti during or shortly after his waterboarding in 2003. At that time, he actually dug in his heels and just told interrogators that the courier was "retired" and of little importance.

Second, the actual lead to al-Kuwaiti came from a different man, Hassan Ghul, who had not been subjected to the waterboard or other harsh EITs. Ghul was captured in Iraq in 2004 and his interrogation was described to New York Times reporters by one CIA official as "quite cooperative" - one in which "rough treatment, if any, would have been brief." Ghul told his CIA interviewers that al-Kuwaiti was close to bin Laden, KSM, and Abu Faraj al-Libi, who was detained and interrogated later. This was the real lead.

Third, KSM never gave up al-Kuwaiti. In fact, KSM and al-Libi - both subjected to EITs - refused to acknowledge that al-Kuwaiti was anyone at all important. Clever investigators later worked out that these refusals - in conjunction with Ghul's testimony - probably indicated that al-Kuwaiti was, in fact, quite important. But they did not even put those pieces together until much later in 2005 - more than two years after KSM's waterboarding had ceased and interrogators had garnered troves of information from him by flattering his ego and winning his trust.

To be clear, neither KSM nor al-Libi gave up al-Kuwaiti - at least not verbally. And certainly not because of waterboarding or other harsh treatment. The man who offered up the courier to the world's most wanted terrorist gave him up to skilled interrogators who inspired his cooperation, not tormentors who beat, or 'attention slapped,' or 'walled,' or half-drowned the information out of him.

A Familiar Story
If Yoo and Rove and Cheney and all the others pushing this narrative just got it wrong this one time, they might be forgiven for jubilant self-celebration of what must feel like a win for them, too. No doubt, they put a lot of effort into tracking down bin Laden and it is understandable that they might seek to place their names on the victory trophy. But this is not the first, or the second, or even the twentieth time these men and their colleagues have attempted to claim that EITs have been responsible for successes that owe entirely to other counterterrorism tactics and strategies.

Shortly after president Obama's inauguration, former vice president Dick Cheney took the offensive in the battle to define the policy legacy of the outgoing administration, publicly criticizing the new president for weakening the country's defenses with his executive order banning the CIA's use of EITs. Sitting CIA Director, Mike Hayden, joined Cheney's side, arguing that the tactics had been necessary to gain information that had prevented American deaths. Cheney, along with his daughter Liz and her advocacy group Keep America Safe, steadily beat the drum on this point throughout the spring and summer of 2009, eventually securing the public disclosure of CIA documents they claimed would prove that EITs had produced life-saving information out of otherwise tight-lipped detainees.

When the documents finally came out, they proved no such thing - only that two of the three detainees who had been subject to the methods, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) provided useful information in response to unspecified interrogation methods. Eyewitness accounts of their interrogations clarified the specifics, showing that Zubaydah and KSM resisted adversarial techniques and only provided useful information to those FBI and CIA interviewers who built rapport and trust with them. After multiple public statements by Cheney, Hayden, and CIA employee John Kiriakou (who later admitted his public statements had been false) suggested that EITs including water-boarding had cracked Abu Zubaydah, Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator assigned to Abu Zubaydah, finally came forward to correct the record.

In an April 2009 New York Times op-ed followed by testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 13, Soufan explained the timeline and techniques by which he had elicited useful information from Zubaydah and registered his judgment that EITS "from an operational perspective, are ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda." Former speechwriter and adviser for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, Marc Thiessen, has flatly characterized Soufan's statements as "simply false," (Courting Disaster, page 87) but has posited no motive for Soufan's supposed deception.

KSM's interrogators, too, have reported to New York Times journalist Scott Shane that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks served as a virtual Al Qaeda consultant to the CIA (offering them blackboard lectures on the operations and ideological underpinnings of bin Laden's group) not because his ego and self-concept were broken by sleep-deprivation, water-boarding, or other EITs, but because it was flattered and manipulated by lead interrogator Deuce Martinez for whom KSM developed a close admiration.

Many others in the security establishment with access to the unredacted transcripts of Zubaydah's and KSM's interrogations have also rejected claims that EITs provided life saving intelligence. CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, after an extensive review, reported in 2004 that he found no evidence that EITs had foiled imminent plots as had been claimed by Bush, Cheney, Hayden, and others. FBI Director Robert Mueller told Vanity Fair's David Rose the same thing in December 2008. And Peter Clarke, former head of Scotland Yard, reacting to Thiessen's claims that information attained from KSM had prevented the Heathrow bombing plot, squarely rejected his analysis, calling it "completely and utterly wrong."

More recently, as Shane and Savage report "Glenn L. Carle, a retired C.I.A. officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002, said that coercive techniques 'didn't provide useful, meaningful, trustworthy information.' Even the CIA's own interrogation manuals - formulated in the mid-20th century at a time when the agency was deeply researching interrogation techniques - warns agents that "Use of force is a poor technique, yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

Still, former administration officials who participated in or abetted the development of the EIT program (architected by a pair of enterprising retired military personnel with a flawed and reductive understanding of human psychology) have not ceased making their claims that EITs saved American lives. Thiessen, more than anyone in or close to the previous administration, has mastered the art of conflating 'information gained from detainees who underwent EITs' with information gained thanks to interrogators' rapport-based approaches to (and cunning psychological manipulation of) subjects who also underwent EITs at some other point during their detainment. (See Thiessen's most recent book, Courting Disaster, for a skillful deployment of this and several other logical/rhetorical fallacies.)

Michael Hayden's and Michael Mukasey's case for EITs has closely followed that of Cheney and Thiessen, refusing to disaggregate and analyze individual interrogation techniques on their own merits, but instead eliding the intelligence gained from effective and noncontroversial techniques with the unspecified effects of EITs. They also repeat roundly debunked claims that coercive techniques prevented imminent attacks on London's Heathrow Airport and Los Angeles' Library Tower. Hayden, too, has defended the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes (prior to their review by the Intelligence committees in Congress or CIA Inspector General Helgerson) that could have provided evidence for or against his conclusions about EITs. He justified their destruction as necessary to protect the identities of his agents, but as Senator Carl Levin has pointed out, Hayden's logic would also require that the CIA keep no record (video, audio, paper, or otherwise) of any of their agents' identities - an obviously untenable administrative practice.

Both Hayden and Mukasey argue that CIA interrogation practices should never have been publicly discussed in the first place, repeating Thiessen's canard that the mere revelation of interrogation techniques gives detainees the opportunity to study them and fully resist them (Courting Disaster, page 67). If this were true, of course, police - whose interrogation practices are routinely discussed and portrayed on countless television programs - would never produce any useful information or confessions.

The record of these men's arguments in support of EITs suggests they are not coming forward as "good faith" mediators of a national discussion on security policies, but as very interested and engaged polemicists seeking to sway public opinion toward their beliefs and (personal and legal) interests.

Toward Effective Interrogation
If the American people are to have the kinds of security policies they deserve - policies which most effectively keep them safe while hastening the demise of Al Qaeda's (and other terrorists') campaigns - it is high time we set aside these polemics about EITs and take a cold hard look at the facts. As Air Force Colonel and former interrogator in Iraq, Steven Kleinmann, has suggested, we probably even need "a new intelligence agency or sub-agencey devoted solely to interrogation -- sponsoring research, conducting training and building a team of sophisticated interrogators with lingusitic and psychological skills." There is no credible evidence that the less sophisticated "rough stuff" has helped us at all in our efforts to counter terrorism.