Word: generalization
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...April, after the Obama Administration released the Bush Administration's so-called torture memos, which provided the legal rationale for the tactics, Cheney demanded that it also release two CIA memos that, he said, would "show the success of the effort." Those memos, taken together with the unclassified inspector general's report into the CIA's interrogation program, would be the smoking gun that proved, once and for all, that harsh interrogation paid...
...inspector general's report says it "did not uncover any evidence that these plots were imminent." The CIA memos say information gained from detainees led to "arrests [that] disrupted attack plans in progress" - but stop short of attributing this directly to the enhanced interrogations...
What makes a definitive analysis difficult is the fact that the inspector general's report and both memos are, despite their declassification, still substantially redacted. One consequence is that it is hard to establish timelines: for instance, how much information did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provide before he was waterboarded, and how much afterward? (Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times, Zubaydah 83 times and Nashiri twice.) (Read "How Waterboarding Got Out of Control...
Another, more fundamental question hard to answer with certainty is whether the interrogators needed to use harsh techniques at all. The inspector general's report says that at least in some instances, they were used "without justification." Even interrogators in the field worried that their bosses' "assessments to the effect that detainees [were] withholding information [were] not always supported by an objective evaluation, but are too heavily based, instead, on presumptions of what the individual might or should know." But ultimately, the conclusion of the inspector general's report in this regard is not, well, particularly conclusive: "The effectiveness...
...plan to [attack Heathrow]." This could suggest he gave up the information before he was put on the waterboard. But as with much of the eagerly anticipated documents, its meaning is anything but clear. Which means that far from ending the debate on whether harsh interrogation worked, the inspector general's report and CIA memos have simply provided more grist to both sides of the argument...