Former CIA Director: Interrogation Impact Deniers Are in the Same League as Truthers and Birthers

Given that a lefty commenter whose web site currently focuses exclusively on Ohio (I guess that's what you have to do when the actions of Dems in Washington become totally indefensible) recently ended his rant with an admonishment that I should go back to my (non-existent) birtherism obsession, I found former CIA Director Michael Hayden's Wall Street Journal op-ed on the topic this morning refreshingly sane.

Excerpts:

Birthers, Truthers and Interrogation Deniers
The latest lunacy to get a popular hearing is the idea that harsh CIA interrogations yielded no useful intelligence. I guess we should toss out the 9/11 Commission Report.

For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 “truthers” who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot. And then we have the “birthers” who, even in the face of clear contrary evidence, take as an article of faith that President Obama was not born in the United States and hence is not eligible to hold his current office.

Let me add a third denomination to this faith-based constellation: interrogation deniers, i.e., individuals who hold that the enhanced interrogation techniques used against CIA detainees have never yielded useful intelligence. They, of course, cling to this view despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the testimony of four CIA directors, and despite Mr. Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan's statement that there's been “a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists.”

… But let the record show that when I was first briefed in 2007 about the brightening prospect of pursuing bin Laden through his courier network, a crucial component of the briefing was information provided by three CIA detainees, all of whom had been subjected to some form of enhanced interrogation. One of the most alerting pieces of evidence was that two of the detainees who had routinely been cooperative and truthful (after they had undergone enhanced techniques) were atypically denying apparent factual data—a maneuver taken as a good sign that the CIA was on to something important.

So that there is no ambiguity, let me be doubly clear: It is nearly impossible for me to imagine any operation like the May 2 assault on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that would not have made substantial use of the trove of information derived from CIA detainees, including those on whom enhanced techniques had been used.

… We can debate what was appropriate then, or now, but this is a discussion about a particular historical fact: Information derived from enhanced interrogation techniques helped lead us to bin Laden.

Let me also remind readers that the Associated Press reported Hayden's assertions as facts less than 24 hours after bin Laden's demise:

Note the reference to “current and former” U.S. officials. That means people working under Obama and Bush 43, acknowledging the obvious, both told the AP the same thing.

In other words, there is no debate over the relevance of enhanced interrogation in Osama bin Laden's demise; there are only interrogation reality recognizers and interrogation deniers.

The AP reporter(s) who couldn't handle the truth would appear to be in line to join the denier camp. The third paragraph above says that the news relayed in the first two paragraphs will “reignite the debate.” What it really does is end it.