You Can’t Get There From Here

One of the most annoying things about movement conservatives, I find, is the way they combine insufferably sanctimonious self-righteousness with a complete disregard for facts. I’m not talking here about “facts” that should more properly be called opinions — like, for instance, “Torture has kept Americans safe from another terrorist attack for seven years now. That is a fact.” I’m talking about facts that are based on the laws of physics — like the fact that information provided by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed under torture after he was arrested in March 2003 could not have helped foil a plot to blow up the Library Tower in Los Angeles (now called the U.S. Bank Tower) that was discovered in 2002.

The Library Tower plot has been used ad nauseum by torture apologists to “prove” that torture produces actionable intelligence. The most recent example is one Frank J. Fleming, who writes this at Pajamas Media:

A civilized nation should never torture. Period. Ever, for any reason. No matter how many lives are at stake. It always just reduces us to animals that thirst for the pain of others. We say we want it to stop “terrorists” from killing us, but if in the process we murder our own humanity, what’s the point? And anyway, torture doesn’t work. I don’t care what basic logic or common sense or history tells you. It never works. Ever. That’s what studies say. Scientific ones where, to test the efficacy, they tortured monkeys to see if they could get the monkeys to talk, and none of them ever did. So with that issue settled, for what other reason could we be seeking torture but inhuman sadistic pleasure?

Yes, some are claiming that the torturing of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed saved thousands of people from a plot to blow up the Library Tower in Los Angeles, but that’s ridiculous. First of all, if they really got useful information, then they obviously didn’t use torture because it’s a well-known fact that torture doesn’t work (remember the studies I mentioned). But they claimed they used waterboarding, which they say is not torture but we all know is totally torture. I mean, they hold someone down and pour water — real water — on his face; try that on a cat and see if it acts like that isn’t torture. Thus, since waterboarding is torture, it obviously didn’t cause KSM to give up information because torture doesn’t work. Thus, he must have given up the information for reasons completely unrelated to the waterboarding.

Now look at what we (and by we, I mean you, because I’m not a part of this) have become. Torturers. And what did we gain? Information on a terror plot that was probably never going to happen in the first place. And even if it was going to happen, it’s not like thousands of people don’t die in LA every year anyway. Plus, “Library Tower” isn’t actually a library. So we gained nothing, and we debased ourselves by becoming nothing more than common Cheneys. Just because someone masterminded a plot that killed thousands doesn’t make it right to pour water on him.

So I hope your bloodthirst has been quenched, you mindless barbarians. You may say Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is “evil,” but then I ask, “Who is holding whom hostage and pouring water on his face?” No wonder the rest of the world looks at us and sees who the real terrorists are. This is what our torture has done to us. And I weep.

So do I — for Fleming’s shoddy, sloppy thinking, for his lack of interest in doing some basic research to confirm that a claim is true before making it, and for the condescending attitude toward opponents of torture for their lack of attention to “basic logic or common sense or history” when he hasn’t even paid attention to facts.

On April 21, Timothy Noah debunked the Library Tower canard in response to Marc Thiessen’s op-ed in the Washington Post that day:

… [Marc] A. Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter, argues in a Washington Post op-ed (”The CIA’s Questioning Worked“) that justification for the Bush administration’s techniques is there for all to see in a memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel dated May 30, 2005, one of the four made public.

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques “led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.” KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that “information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the ‘Second Wave.’ ” In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

Ah, the Library Tower. The thwarting of al-Qaida’s attack on it was a favorite talking point of President Bush (though he sometimes called it the “Liberty Tower“; for the past six years, its formal name has been the U.S. Bank Tower). Because the Library Tower is in Los Angeles, the al-Qaida plot to bring it down is sometimes confused with the Millennium Plot, a separate plan to attack Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Day 2000—supported but not organized by al-Qaida—that came much closer to fruition. The Library Tower … stands 73 stories high and is the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi. … Sheikh Mohammed initially planned to crash a jetliner into it on 9/11 as part of a scheme involving not four but 10 passenger planes on both coasts. Osama Bin Laden vetoed that as too ambitious and scaled back the plan to focus on New York and Washington. After 9/11, Sheikh Mohammed still hoped to execute the attack on the Library Tower and, working with a Southeast Asian al-Qaida affiliate (the aforementioned Hambali), recruited four terror cell members to carry it out.

The first reason to be skeptical that this planned attack could have been carried out successfully is that, as I’ve noted before, attacking buildings by flying planes into them didn’t remain a viable al-Qaida strategy even through Sept. 11, 2001. Thanks to cell phones, passengers on United Flight 93 were able to learn that al-Qaida was using planes as missiles and crashed the plane before it could hit its target. There was no way future passengers on any flight would let a terrorist who killed the pilot and took the controls fly wherever he pleased.

What clinches the falsity of Thiessen’s claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen’s argument), is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush’s counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and “at that point, the other members of the cell” (later arrested) “believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward” [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, “In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast.” These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush’s characterization of it as a “disrupted plot” was “ludicrous”—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn’t captured until March 2003.

How could Sheikh Mohammed’s water-boarded confession have prevented the Library Tower attack if the Bush administration “broke up” that attack during the previous year? It couldn’t, of course. Conceivably the Bush administration, or at least parts of the Bush administration, didn’t realize until Sheikh Mohammed confessed under torture that it had already broken up a plot to blow up the Library Tower about which it knew nothing. Stranger things have happened. But the plot was already a dead letter. If foiling the Library Tower plot was the reason to water-board Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then that water-boarding was more than cruel and unjust. It was a waste of water.

Each time another reality-based writer points out the chronology problem with claiming that torturing KSM helped break up plans to attack the Library Tower, I say to myself that torture supporters could not possibly be clueless or dumb enough to bring it up again as an example of how information gained through torture saved American lives. But, always, they are.