Prior to the release of every newly declassified document related to the CIA interrogation program, some horrifying detail is previewed in the press. In April, Mark Danner wrote an account in the New York Review of Books of interviews that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had conducted with high-value detainees. According to the ICRC, top detainee Abu Zubaydah told how his interrogators had used a plastic collar to slam him “directly against a hard concrete wall.” Danner dwells on the plastic collar as a ghoulish instrument, on par with rubber poles the Soviets used to beat political prisoners.

Then Bush-administration legal memos detailing the methods were released. An Aug. 1, 2002, memo discussed the “walling” of Abu Zubaydah. He’d be pushed against “a flexible false wall” with only his shoulder blades hitting the wall and with a collar around his neck — “to help prevent whiplash.” Part of the point of the exercise was to create a startling, loud crashing sound, “a sound that will make the impact seem far worse than it is and that will be far worse than any injury that might result from the action.” This context creates an altogether different impression from that given by the account of Zubaydah’s being thrown against a concrete wall, willy-nilly.

Before the release of the 2004 CIA inspector-general report in late August, two of the outlandish details hyped in the press were reports of a threat by an interrogator to rape a detainee’s family members and of mock executions staged to convince detainees that other detainees had been killed. Both would strike most people as out of bounds and both could, depending on the exact circumstances, constitute torture.

But when the IG report was released, again, the context put the incidents in a different light. One CIA officer, according to the report, threatened the mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, by telling him that if he didn’t cooperate “we could bring your mother in here” and “we can bring your family in here.” Another person present thought the officer hoped his Arabic dialect would lead al-Nashiri to think he was in the custody of a Middle Eastern country where — horrifically — prisoners are routinely interrogated by sexually abusing their female relatives in front of them. The officer denied it and told the IG he never told al-Nashiri who he was or where he was from, letting him draw his own conclusions. Perhaps even this was too much, but the report relayed the element of ambiguity in the event.

On the mock executions, the IG report says that, after one, a detainee who witnessed a fake body reportedly “sang like a bird.” But it discusses other mock executions that were “transparently a ruse” and utterly ineffective. Even attempting such a thing was a mistake — the method was not specifically authorized and wasn’t repeated once the CIA got a better handle on the program. But a mock execution that doesn’t scare anyone because it’s so obviously false hardly constitutes a mock execution.

So it is that every interrogation document slated for release is about to deliver a devastating blow to Bush-era criminality — but the blow never quite comes. Indeed, the documents — especially the latest batch from the CIA — have buttressed the case for Bush’s interrogation program and undermined the critics.

The opponents say the program was lawless and ineffectual. The documents suggest the opposite on both counts. The CIA was obsessed with getting legal clearance from the Department of Justice, and Justice closely parsed just about everything the CIA did. If the legal reasoning is open to dispute in various instances, there should be no doubt that the Bush administration sincerely grappled with what it could do under the law to protect the country in the aftermath of 9/11. As far as efficacy is concerned, the IG report and the two other just-released CIA reports explain how the interrogations produced a remarkable trove of intelligence. The program revealed ongoing plots and made possible the capture of operatives around the world and in the U.S. Without it, the chances of an attack in the U.S. would have been much higher.

The program originated in the exigencies of 9/11. Bin Laden’s lieutenant Abu Zubaydah was our first high-level detainee. Shot while being captured in March 2002, he was given medical treatment, and his questioning was delayed for several weeks while he recovered. When we started interrogating him with “non-aggressive, non-physical elicitation techniques,” in the words of the IG report, he was thought to be holding out. But he “presented the Agency with the opportunity to obtain actionable intelligence on future threats to the United States from the most senior al Qaeda member in U.S. custody at that time.” What to do?

The critics of the interrogation program presumably would have let it go and just hoped that Abu Zubaydah would eventually tell us what we needed to know. Perhaps he would have. The prospect of indefinite detention, or patient relationship-building on the part of an interrogator, might have persuaded him to talk over time. Except how were we supposed to know how much time we had before another attack?

Thus the enhanced-interrogation techniques (EITs) were born. The CIA wanted to ascertain that the techniques it was contemplating caused no long-term psychological harm. It consulted the Department of Defense, where harsh techniques were used in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training program. The Department of Defense “concluded no long-term psychological effects resulted from use of the EITs, including the most taxing technique, the waterboard, on SERE students,” according to the IG report. The CIA also sought guidance from the Department of Justice on what was legal.

Ten practices were adopted, from the relatively innocuous “attention grab” (the interrogator grasps the detainee and thrusts him forward) and “facial hold” (holding the detainee’s head) to the much harsher methods of sleep deprivation and waterboarding. The CIA wanted to walk up to, but not cross, the line of “severe pain or suffering” that constitutes torture. This is inherently a fraught exercise. It will involve making close legal distinctions and using practices that in another context — e.g., dealing with lawful prisoners of war — would clearly be abusive. But as the IG report puts it flatly, “the Agency was under pressure to do everything possible to prevent additional terrorist attacks.”

The CIA wanted to do the task assigned to it — get intelligence to foil ongoing plots — without running afoul of its minders. It was the very opposite of a rogue agency. “In early 2003, CIA officials, at the urging of the General Counsel, continued to inform senior Administration officials and the leadership of the Congressional Oversight Committees of the then-current status of the CTC Program,” the IG report says. “The Agency specifically wanted to ensure that these officials and the Committees continued to be aware and approve of CIA’s actions.”

And the interrogation process — although looser than it should have been at the beginning — was tightly controlled. “Headquarters must approve the use of each specific EIT in advance,” the IG report explained. “EITs may be employed only by trained and certified interrogators for use with a specific detainee and with appropriate medical and psychological monitoring of the process.”

Details mattered. Consider “water dousing.” The IG report explains that “dousing involves laying a detainee down on a plastic sheet and pouring water over him for 10 to 15 minutes. Another officer explained that the room was maintained at 70 degrees or more; the guards used water that was at room temperature while the interrogator questioned the detainee.” One interrogator sought permission from headquarters to douse detainees. The return cable, says the IG report, “directed that the detainee must be placed on a towel or sheet, may not be placed naked on the bare cement floor, and the air temperature must exceed 65 degrees if the detainee will not be dried immediately.”

Even a New York Times news report noticed that the impression of the documents “is by no means one of gung-ho operatives running wild. It is a portrait of overwhelming control exercised from C.I.A. headquarters and the Department of Justice.” The smallest deviation was frowned upon. An officer admitted in the IG report that he and a colleague had blown cigar smoke in al-Nashiri’s face during an interrogation. He said he wouldn’t do it again based on “perceived criticism.”

In another of the unauthorized incidents that garnered major press, a CIA officer racked a handgun close to al-Nashiri’s head once or twice. Later, the officer revved a power drill in the cell with al-Nashiri while he was hooded or naked (he wasn’t touched with the drill). The intimidation with the gun and drill hadn’t been authorized by headquarters, nor was it immediately reported after it took place.

How it was handled when it came to light is instructive. The agency immediately called the offending officer back to headquarters. He faced an internal accountability board, suffered a reprimand, and eventually resigned. The Justice Department looked into the case because threatening a detainee with “imminent death” is torture, but declined to prosecute. (These unauthorized incidents, which Attorney General Eric Holder has asked a prosecutor to examine with an eye to reopening criminal cases, are murky. According to the IG report, “for all of the instances, the allegations were disputed or too ambiguous to reach any authoritative determination regarding the facts.”)

Was it worth it? Did the benefits justify walking up to the line of torture? The answer is clearly yes. In a war on terror in which intelligence is paramount, the interrogation program was almost the equivalent of the ULTRA program that broke German codes in World War II. “Detainees have played some role in nearly every capture of al Qaeda members and associates since 2002, including helping us unravel most of the network associated with the now detained 11 September mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed,” according to the June 3, 2005, CIA document titled “Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the War Against Al Qaeda.” Overall, according to the same document, “detainees in mid-2003 helped us build a list of 70 individuals — many of whom we had never heard of before — that al-Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations.”

“Invaluable” is too weak a word for this kind of intelligence. The IG report says that detainees made the CIA aware of plots to attack the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan; to fly hijacked aircraft into Heathrow Airport; to derail a train in the U.S.; to blow up gas stations in the U.S.; to fly an airplane into the tallest building in California; and to collapse bridges in New York.

“In this regard,” the IG report concludes, “there is no doubt that the Program has been effective.” The report is more cautious on whether the enhanced techniques themselves accounted for these successes. But the facts make it obvious, and the former CIA inspector general responsible for the report, John Helgerson, recently told the Washington Post that “waterboarding and sleep deprivation were the two most powerful techniques and elicited a lot of information.” Top terrorists like Zubaydah and al-Nashiri were withholding information prior to the application of the toughest techniques, and were compliant afterward. Surely their decision to talk didn’t result from a sudden fit of conscience.

The IG report called KSM “an accomplished resistor” who provided mostly “outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete” information until he was waterboarded. Subsequently, he became the “most prolific” source of important leads. A report in the Washington Post portrays the compliant KSM as practically a lecturer in his own School for Advanced Terrorism Studies. He sometimes used a chalkboard as he explained to the CIA officer the details of al-Qaeda’s doctrine and inner workings.

The IG report relates how KSM’s cooperation led to the arrest of a truck driver in the U.S. named Iyman Faris who was plotting attacks on New York landmarks; of a sleeper operative in New York named Saleh Almari; of an operative named Majid Khan who had easy entrée into the U.S.; and of two Pakistani businessmen whom KSM “planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States.”

Information from interrogations built on itself, as the June 2005 CIA document outlines. KSM knew we had captured an operative named Majid Khan and assumed Khan was talking, so he told us he had directed Khan to deliver money to people working for another senior al-Qaeda operative. We confronted Khan with this information. He, in turn, admitted his role and told us he had delivered the money to an operative called Zubair, providing a description and contact number. We then captured Zubair, who gave us information about a terrorist called Hambali, the contact between the Southeast Asian terror group Jemaah Islamiya and al-Qaeda. We rolled up the entire cell, which was thought to be training for the plot to fly a hijacked plane into the tallest building in California.

In another example of such a virtuous cycle, KSM thought we already knew about al-Qaeda’s anthrax program because an operative involved in it named Yazid Sufaat was in custody. KSM told of three operatives who were trying to produce anthrax. We confronted Sufaat with the information and he provided further information that led to the capture of his two associates.

The interrogations really should be viewed as a continuation of the war by different means. When the detainees were compliant, they weren’t subjected to harsh techniques — they were no longer in the fight. But if they had knowledge of ongoing plots that they were keeping from us, they were, in effect, still combatants. And coercion was appropriate. Their cell was just the battlefield in a different form.

Throughout the interrogation debate, the Left has peddled a just-so story — that the interrogations were not just wrong, they were ineffective. The documents put that notion to rest. It was always implausible, and the Left insisted on it only because it wanted to argue that its moral absolutism came at no cost. Actually, the cost might have been paid in American blood if we had forgone the toughest techniques — and certainly if we had fully embraced a law-enforcement paradigm in which terrorists would have been read their Miranda rights and encouraged not to talk lest they incriminate themselves.

Supporters of the program shouldn’t fool themselves — strapping a man to a board to convince him he’s going to drown, over and over again, is a nasty business, even if we did it to only three detainees. We were forced by the nature of the terrorists arrayed against us to balance our humanity against our duty to keep our fellow citizens safe. That’s never going to be an entirely comfortable balance. But it was struck as responsibly as could be expected, as we now know thanks to the release of all those hyped documents.