In its never-ending quest to divulge sensitive information to those who mean to do us harm - while the U.S. is at war - The New York Times published an extremely detailed article on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s interrogation in Poland and Guantánamo Bay that “provides the closest look to date beneath the blanket of secrecy that hides the program from terrorists and from critics who accuse the agency of torture.” As an added bonus, the article may well undermine the terrorism trials that will soon commence at Gitmo by giving defense attorneys ammunition to move for dismissal on the grounds that the government’s evidence was obtained through torture.  

The article is notable for another reason, it is based on interviews with “two dozen current and former American and foreign intelligence officials,” most of whom “would speak of the highly classified program only on the condition of anonymity,” and focuses on one C.I.A. interrogator – described as “a career narcotics analyst who did not speak the terrorists’ native languages and had no interrogation experience” - who declined to participate in the article and requested that he not be named in it.

The Times honored the requests for anonymity by sources who cooperated in the article, but not by the one man who wanted nothing at all to do with it. (The editors explain the decision to out this C.I.A. agent here. Scooter Libby, call your lawyers.) Whether he was “never” or “ever” undercover is irrelevant - until The Times outed him he was a private citizen, just like Richard Jewell before the Atlanta Journal Constitution did its whack job on him (second item).

Before reading the “highlights” of The Times exposé on our intelligence-gathering methods below, first consider this snippet from an article in Commentary by senior editor Gabriel Schoenfeld, just to put things into perspective:

In June 1942, eight Nazi saboteurs were captured in the United States; one of them was an American citizen. The group had plans to blow up defense plants and other national infrastructure, along with Jewish-owned department stores. President Roosevelt demanded of Francis Biddle, his attorney general, that the men be tried by a military commission.

Although Biddle had reservations about whether the law would permit this, FDR swept such scruples aside. In short order, a commission was established that had "no written procedures," operated in total secrecy, and was not based upon law. The Supreme Court took up a habeas corpus plea from the saboteurs but then beat a hasty retreat in the face of threats from the White House. In the end, the military commission pronounced a death sentence on six of the eight. A week later, to the approbation of the public as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post, they went to the electric chair. All this happened in the course of a mere six weeks after their capture.

Compare such proceedings with the ongoing effort since 9/11 to establish military commissions for prisoners in Guantanamo. With the executive branch curtailed, that effort is now dragging into its seventh year with no end in sight. It involves men charged with crimes outstripping anything done by the hapless German saboteurs who had managed only to wander around Manhattan and Chicago, spending $612 of the $174,588 they had brought with them. The fact that captured al Qaeda terrorists are today being represented by blue-chip law firms and are using the federal courts to challenge every aspect of the government's case offers a glimpse of how radically the cultural landscape has changed.

And now, without further ado, The Times account of how the C.I.A. broke KSM:

In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland, Al Qaeda’s engineer of mass murder faced off against his Central Intelligence Agency interrogator. It was 18 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq was giving Muslim extremists new motives for havoc. …

The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a C.I.A. offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called “knuckledraggers.”

Mr. Martinez came in after the rough stuff, the ultimate good cop with the classic skills … He achieved a rapport with Mr. Mohammed that astonished his fellow C.I.A. officers.

A canny opponent, Mr. Mohammed mixed disinformation and braggadocio with details of plots, past and planned. Eventually, he grew loquacious. “They’d have long talks about religion,” comparing notes on Islam and Mr. Martinez’s Catholicism, one C.I.A. officer recalled. …

[W]hether it was a result of a fear of waterboarding, the patient trust-building mastered by Mr. Martinez or the demoralizing effects of isolation, Mr. Mohammed and some other prisoners had become quite compliant. In fact, according to several officials, they had become a sort of terrorist focus group, advising their captors on their fellow extremists’ goals, ideology and tradecraft. …

“It was to understand the mind of a terrorist - how a terrorist would do certain things,” the foreign official said of the discussions of hypothetical attacks. Thus did the architect of 9/11 become, in effect, a counterterrorism adviser to the American government he professed to despise. …

[T]he tough treatment began shortly after Mr. Mohammed was delivered to Poland. By several accounts, he proved especially resistant, chanting from the Koran, doling out innocuous information or offering obvious fabrications. The Times reported last year that the intensity of his treatment - various harsh techniques, including waterboarding, used about 100 times over a period of two weeks - prompted worries that officers might have crossed the boundary into illegal torture.

His cooperation came in fits and starts, and interrogators said they believed at times that he gave them disinformation. But he talked most freely to Mr. Martinez.

Human rights advocates have long claimed that KSM admitted to beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl just to make the torture stop, but  he apparently volunteered the information unbidden - and actually had to prove it to a skeptical C.I.A. by pointing out “details of the hand and arm of the masked killer in a videotape of the murder that appeared to show it was him.”

They May Not Have Teeth, But They Got Brains

In an Ipsos MORI poll of 1,039 adult Brits, six out of 10 agreed that “many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change” and four out of 10 “sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say,” reports The Guardian:

The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions. …

There is growing concern that an economic depression and rising fuel and food prices are denting public interest in environmental issues. Some environmentalists blame the public's doubts on last year's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.

However Professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, said politicians and campaigners were to blame for over-simplifying the problem by only publicising evidence to support the case. …

Two out of three participants in the poll were “cynical” about the government levying green taxes to curb global warming, regarding it as a “stealth” tax.

Measuring The Drapes For The Oval Office

Check out the “presidential seal” on the lectern when presumptive – and presumptuous – Dem nominee Sen. Barack Obama spoke before a meeting of Dem Governors at the Chicago History Museum Friday, June 20, 2008.

G-dless Communism Is Becoming Less G-dless in China

While the great cathedrals of Europe are bereft of worshippers, Christianity is flourishing in China. According to the World Christian Database, Christians make up 5 percent of the population – second only to Buddhists.

“By some estimates Christian churches, most of them underground, now have roughly 70 million members, as many as the party itself. A growing number of those Christians are in fact party members,” reports the Chicago Tribune:

Christianity - repressed, marginalized and, in many cases, illegal in China for more than half a century - is sweeping the country, overflowing churches and posing a sensitive challenge to the officially atheist Communist Party. …

Christianity is thriving in part because it offers a moral framework to citizens adrift in an age of Wild West capitalism that has not only exacted a heavy toll in corruption and pollution but also harmed the global image of products “Made in China.” …

At the same time, Christianity is driving citizens to be more politically assertive, emboldening them to push for greater freedoms and testing the party's willingness to adapt.  …

[Rev. Jin Mingri, 39, founder and pastor of Zion Church in Beijing] embodies a historic change: After centuries of foreign efforts to implant Christianity in China, today's Christian ascension is led not by missionaries but by evangelical citizens at home. Where Christianity once was confined largely to poor villages, it is now spreading into urban power centers with often tacit approval from the regime.

It reaches into the most influential corners of Chinese life: Intellectuals disillusioned by the 1989 crackdown at Tiananmen Square are placing their loyalty in faith, not politics; tycoons fed up with corruption are seeking an ethical code; and Communist Party members are daring to argue that their faith does not put them at odds with the government.

The boundaries of what is legal and what is not are constantly shifting. A new church or Sunday school, for instance, might be permissible one day and taboo the next, because local officials have broad latitude to interpret laws on religious gatherings.

Jin is among those who turned to G-d in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. His atheistic parents were at a loss to understand conversion. “They thought I'd gone crazy,” he tells the Chicago Tribune.

The Stiletto Scoops Joe Queenan

[A]fter years of public education campaigns in school and on TV kids know smoking is bad and cigars are really bad, therefore smoking a cigar is a metaphor for “bad guy” just like the black cowboy hat in yesteryear’s Westerns. Any kid who wants to emulate the villain has problems that are better addressed by the American Psychiatric Association than the American Medical Association.

- Sometimes A Cigar Is Not Just A Cigar, The Stiletto Blog, June 18, 2008

Everywhere you went, little boys between the age of nine and 14 were puffing on stogies. And by the looks of it, they were enjoying themselves. 

“It's not just 'The Incredible Hulk' that's causing this,” said a friend of mine who works in an upscale cigar emporium. “There are also all those scenes in 'Ironman' where Jeff Bridges has a cigar jutting out of his mouth. … A lot of little kids are going to grow up to be evil ...They know it, their parents know it, and cigar store owners know it. And since cigar smokers are inherently evil, I think a lot of these kids want to get started early. You know, learn the ropes.”

- Hollywood Stogies, The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2008