The torture Right's tunnel vision on interrogation tactics

In light of word that Riduan Isamuddin aka Hambali -- the man accused of plotting the 2002 bombing in Bali that killed 200+ -- will be tried in Washington, D.C., former Bush speechwriter and torture enthusiast Marc Thiessen spews some predictable bile.

Thiessen's post from National Review's The Corner:

Hambali is being called the mastermind of the Bali bombings. That may be an accurate description, but it understates his importance. He was in fact the leader of a Southeast Asian terrorist network that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed turned to after 9/11 to carry out the “Second Wave” — a plot to hijack a plane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles. (KSM knew we would be on the lookout for Arab men, so he asked Hambali to recruit a cell of Southeast Asian operatives to infiltrate the United States. I tell the full story of the takedown of the Hambali network in Courting Disaster.)

Hambali and the key members of his terror network were captured only because of information gained from KSM after he underwent enhanced interrogation techniques. (Indeed, it seems that virtually everyone the Obama administration wants to put on trial in civilian court was captured as a result of the CIA interrogation program that Obama shut down.) After 9/11, we were unaware of the Hambali network or its plans — until CIA detainees were captured and questioned. Those detainees told us what we needed to know to take the network down.

The torture Right refuses to acknowledge the actual chronology of KSM's capture and the disintegration of the Library Tower plot. Adam Serwer at TAPPED again explains:

... the most prominent example in the supposed "wave of suicide hijackings" supposedly disrupted by waterboarding KSM, the attack on the Library Tower in L.A., had been canceled before KSM was captured. Bush had bragged about disrupting the L.A. Towers plot in 2002, but KSM hadn't been captured in 2003.

Under interrogation by the CIA at a black site, Hambali revealed plans for a "wave" of attacks on U.S. subways and businesses and a planned attack using anthrax -- except as Jane Mayer reported in The Dark Side, those plots had already been disrupted by December 2001, and the scientist developing the anthrax was already in U.S. custody.

As for whether the information KSM gave led to Hambali's capture, some of it may have. It's politically convenient for the the GOP to draw a direct line between KSM being waterboarded and Hambali being captured, but that presupposes that the U.S. had no assistance from overseas partners. In the imaginary world of 24, all you have to do is torture a suspect to get information. But in reality, piecing together intelligence information is a complicated process, and it's highly unlikely that KSM provided the only information that led to Hambali's capture. The Bush administration's prior misleading characterizations of how useful information gleaned through torture was don't exactly inspire confidence.

In a separate post, Serwer documents the only part of America that's losing its head over the attempted attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is the GOP, while Obama's response seems to have helped his approval ratings, according to a Pew poll.

Torture has become a crucial plank to one political party's platform, as U.S. Senate candidate (and the current darling of the Right) Scott Brown underscored with his own endorsement of "enhanced interrogation techniques." This is the legacy of the Bush-Cheney years.