And he also killed the radio star, or so they say

It seems pretty likely that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not a nice person, and has done some pretty nasty things. But if, after years in a CIA detention center, and then time in Gitmo, he’s now reportedly confessing to having been behind 9/11, various other attacks, and the beheading of Daniel Pearl … how much credence should we give that confession?

The alternatives:

1. He really did it.
2. He was involved in some fashion, and he’s trying to make a name for himself by confessing to it (I mean, it’s not like he’s going to be set free any time soon, so he has very little to lose and much to gain.) Either he was close enough to things to give a credible story, or else he knows enough to seem credible to intelligence and political groups who really want to show that they’ve caught a Big Bad Guy.
3. As #2, but he’s martyr-like covering from others.
4. After being subjected to various interrogation/coersion techniques (insert your own euphemism), known and unknown, he’s willing to confess to anything he’s asked about (and, as noted, various folks have plenty of incentive to either believe him or pretend they do).

Case #1 is the best, of course. But there’s no way to be sure. #2-3 are certainly possible, given the political pressure (within the intelligence community and in national politics) to catch a Big Bad Guy.

It’s #4 that’s the most troubling, and, of course, is the direct effect of the Administration’s tolerance and/or encouragement of coersive techniques that quite a number of people claim are torture. A lot of people defend torture using the “ticking nuclear bomb” scenario, but that’s not what’s applying here. Torture is possibly effective if you are trying to gather information you could not get otherwise, especially in a timed circumstance. “Where is the bomb planted?” Given that the main
weakness of torture is that, if effective, the subjects will tell you whatever they think you want to hear, true or not, getting verifiable data in a vacuum is a case where it can actually work. “The bomb is under the bridge!” You can go and confirm that.

But when it comes to “Did you do X?” where there’s no way to specifically verify the info given, torture is far less useful (we’ll set aside the moral dimension for the moment, as that’s a separate and more complex issue). If I say, “Yes, I planned the bombing,” am I telling you that because I did, or because I think you want to hear that and that if I say it you’ll take me off the waterboard? Sure, there can be confirming data — but info gathered under torture can’t make the confirming data any
more certain. At some point, it comes down to the believability or credibility of the subject, and under torture, nobody’s statements are credible.

So did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed actually do the things he’s now claimed to have confessed to? Who knows? But the believability of the information has been cast into doubt based on known cases of coersion, and in many quarters, domestic and international, it will be treated with as much credibility as the “confessions” of people from old Soviet gulags.

And that is the real shame of the Administration’s policies — even if they have the truth, nobody can be sure of it, and more and more people are willing to automatically doubt it.

(via DOF)