Over the last few days the right has been trying to rehabilitate the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees, claiming that the ends justified the means. For a sample, click here, here, here, and here.

Don’t be fooled by these “enhanced justification techniques.” (H/T NonSequitur, who coined the term in response to Charles Krauthammer’s justifications for torture, something I have also fisked)

Peter Bergen breaks down the facts and chronology of what information we gleaned from Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) over at Foreign Policy.

Most interesting tidbit:

The CIA inspector general’s report on al Qaeda detainees also concluded that based on a review of KSM’s plots aimed at the United States, it “did not uncover any evidence that these plots were imminent,” but it did find that KSM “provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen who Khalid Shaykh Muhammad planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks [redacted]. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad’s information also led to the investigation and prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver arrested in early 2003 in Ohio.”

The man identified by the CIA inspector general as “Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York” who KSM supposedly gave up to his interrogator appears, in fact, to be Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who was arrested on Dec. 12, 2001, in Peoria, Ill., a year and a half before KSM was captured.

I’ve written extensively about al-Marri, an Al Qaeda sleeper agent that the FBI picked up shortly after September 11, 2001. His arrest had nothing to do with KSM’s statements. This was FBI agents doing police work like we would hope they do. His indictment for credit card fraud and lying to federal agents may not be prosecution for conducting a terrorist attack, but that’s okay — if you can bust him on something else before he blows up a building, then it’s a win all around. Terrorism inherently breaks laws, and prosecuting aspiring terrorists for those crimes neutralizes them.

As former FBI counterterrorism agent Mike German says:

As an FBI agent my counterterrorism investigations never resulted in anyone being charged with terrorism. The terrorists I arrested were charged with specific criminal offenses; possessing and transferring illegal firearms and explosive devices, illegally using firearms and destructive devices, conspiring to use illegal firearms and destructive devices, and conspiring to violate civil rights. Terrorists use these crimes to accomplish their political goals. Once I had evidence of their illegal activities, I could bring charges against them. Certainly the motive behind their conduct came into play to prove they had the requisite criminal intent, but the laws I enforced had absolutely nothing to do with the terrorists’ ideology.

Al-Marri’s criminal prosecution should have been a success story that shows how law enforcement plays a critical role in counterterrorism. Instead, the Bush administration used him as justification for domestic military detention of suspected terrorists, a practice that it claimed would be lawful in the case of an American citizen apprehended on the streets of Anytown, U.S.A.

The rest of the information gained from KSM also fails to justify the blowback from exceeding the lawful limits of interrogation:

The Parachas are a father-and-son team; the former, arrested in Thailand in the summer of 2003, is being held at Guantánamo and has yet to face trial, while his son was convicted in 2005 of providing “material support” to al Qaeda.

Majid Khan was arrested in Pakistan only four days after KSM was captured, suggesting that this lead came not from interrogations but from KSM’s computers and cell phones that were picked up when he was captured.

Of the terrorists, alleged and otherwise, cited by the CIA inspector general as being fingered by KSM during his coercive interrogations, only Ohio truck driver Iyman Faris was an actual al Qaeda foot soldier living in the United States who had serious intention to wreak havoc. However, he was not much of a competent terrorist: In 2002 he researched the feasibility of bringing down the Brooklyn Bridge by using a blowtorch, an enterprise akin to demolishing the Empire State Building with a firecracker.

Bergen does a good job of putting torture in context and how little utility it actually had. Read the whole thing.