About those interrogation techniques

The harsh ones that have been so much in the news the last few days.

Turns out that President Obama's national intelligence director believes they yielded some very good information:

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

But this information was not made public last week:

Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

The administration is going to have to explain this discrepancy between its argument that the enhanced techniques did not yield useful information and the view of its national intelligence director that significantly useful intelligence was indeed obtained with these methods. If it fails to do so a further loss of credibility and confidence in its ability to protect Americans from terrorist attack is inevitable.