Andy already noted yesterday’s important Washington Post story on how our interrogations got KSM to talk. It gives MSM credibility to what we’ve been learning from the newly declassified reports over the last few days — the enhanced interrogation program worked. This demolishes a key argument of the opponents of the program, who have long insisted coercive interrogations can never work and must necessarily backfire. I always thought it was foolish of them to invest so much in this argument since it was so implausible. It showed a key insecurity behind their moral absolutism. The opponents knew that if they admitted that the toughest of these techniques were applied only to a few top operatives who coughed up intelligence that led to the arrest of other terrorists and the discovery of other plots, they could never get much traction with the public. So they had to insist the interrogations didn’t work. Their fall-back position now, in light of all the evidence, is to say that it can’t be proven in some absolute, laboratory-verified sense that the coercive techniques were necessary. But any fair-minded observer applying common sense to what we know — that the likes of KSM resisted prior to the tough interrogations, then cooperated thereafter — will conclude that they indeed worked. Here are three things that I found particularly interesting in the Washington Post story:

1) KSM went in with a plan about how he could appear to cooperate while giving up no valuable information.

After his capture, Mohammed first told his captors what he calculated they already knew.
“KSM almost immediately following his capture in March 2003 elaborated on his plan to crash commercial airlines into Heathrow airport,” according to a document released by the CIA on Monday that summarizes the intelligence provided by Mohammed. The agency thinks he assumed that Ramzi Binalshibh, a Sept. 11 conspirator captured in September 2002, had already divulged the plan.

2) In a strange way, the coercive techniques seem to have given the captives a kind of psychological permission to cooperate with us, at least according to the official cited by the Post.

One former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out said Mohammed, like several other detainees, seemed to have decided that it was okay to stop resisting after he had endured a certain amount of pressure.
“Once the harsher techniques were used on [detainees], they could be viewed as having done their duty to Islam or their cause, and their religious principles would ask no more of them,” said the former official, who requested anonymity because the events are still classified. “After that point, they became compliant. Obviously, there was also an interest in being able to later say, ‘I was tortured into cooperating.’ “

3) KSM and other detainees helped us find operatives in the U.S. — a big deal.

Mohammed described plans to strike targets in Saudi Arabia, East Asia and the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, including using a network of Pakistanis “to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and the Brooklyn bridge in New York.” Cross-referencing material from different detainees, and leveraging information from one to extract more detail from another, the CIA and FBI went on to round up operatives both in the United States and abroad.
“Detainees in mid-2003 helped us build a list of 70 individuals — many of who we had never heard of before — that al-Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations,” according to the CIA summary.