† Waterboarding Works: Waterboarding transformed Khalid Sheik Mohammed from a hardened terrorist to a compliant “professor” who held "terrorist tutorials" in English for U.S. intelligence officers about “the inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group's plans, ideology and operatives” – sometimes with the aid of a chalkboard” and once “scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of an earlier lecture,” reports The Washington Post:

This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.

"KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete," according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA's then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department.

The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result.

But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general's report and other documents released this week indicate. …

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.

A former U.S. official “with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out” tells the WaPo that after being subjected to the rough stuff, “they could be viewed as having done their duty to Islam or their cause, and their religious principles would ask no more of them. After that point, they became compliant.”

With this in mind, former vice president Dick Cheney – who says he “knew about the waterboarding … as a general policy that we had approved” - told “FOX News Sunday” host Chris Wallace that the Obama administration appointing a special prosecutor to investigate detainee “abuse” is “an outrageous political act”:

Chris Wallace: This is your first interview since Attorney General Holder named a prosecutor to investigate possible CIA abuses of terror detainees. What do you think of that decision?

Dick Cheney: [T]he effort now is based upon the inspector general's report that was sent to the Justice Department five years ago, was completely reviewed by the Justice Department in years past. They made decisions about whether or not there was any prosecutable offense there. They found one. It did not involve CIA personnel, it involved contract personnel. That individual was sentenced and is doing time. … Now we've got a political appointee coming back, and supposedly without the approval of the president, going to do a complete review, or another complete investigation, possible prosecution of CIA personnel. … It's a terrible, terrible precedent. …

Wallace: [You say you're proud of what we did. The inspector general's report which was just released from 2004 details some specific interrogations - mock executions, one of the detainees threatened with a handgun and with an electric drill, waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times. … [D]o you think what they did was wrong?

Cheney: Those interrogations were involved in the arrest of nearly all the Al Qaeda members that we were able to bring to justice. I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States. It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well.

Wallace: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it?

Cheney: I am.

Cheney also said that his willingness to talk with the special prosecutor “depend[s] on the circumstances”; that it’s disingenuous for Holder to claim he is an “independent” attorney general since “the president  … is the chief law enforcement officer … whereas [Holder] is a “a member of the cabinet”; that moving interrogations from the CIA to the FBI “moves very much in the direction of going back to the old way of looking at these terrorist attacks - that these are law enforcement problems”; that “the evidence is overwhelming that the EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques] were crucial in getting them to cooperate, and that the information they provided did in fact save thousands of lives and let us defeat all further attacks against the United States” and that he was not “a fan” of Obama’s when he first got elected “and my views have not changed any.”

† The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II: The Los Angeles Times reports that “[t]here's a bull market for bullets …and bullet factories are running around the clock to meet demand”:

Stacks of ammo, once piled high at gun shops across America, have dwindled. Prices paid by consumers for much-sought-after Winchester .380-caliber handgun bullets have doubled. At weekend gun shows, trailers loaded with boxes of ammunition are drained within hours.

Budget-pressed police departments, which can't be caught short, have increased their orders just to be safe, and the U.S. military, fighting two wars, has seen its need for bullets quadruple in recent years.

Bullets are in demand as the nation's appetite for firearms has soared. U.S. gun sales are up since the 2008 presidential election, during which the National Rifle Assn. poured millions of dollars into advertisements suggesting that Democrat Barack Obama would move to restrict gun sales if elected. …

Both guns and ammo are in demand, but it is the bullets that are in short supply.

† NJ Residents Pitch A Fit Over Gadhafi’s Plans To Pitch A Tent In Their State: The Libyan circus is not coming to Englewood after all, reports The New York Times:

Amid pressure from New Jersey political leaders, the Libyan government has canceled plans for its nation’s president, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, to stay in New Jersey during his visit to the United States next month. …

Colonel Qaddafi, who is to address the United Nations during his visit, had planned to erect a Bedouin-style tent on a Libyan-owned estate that sits next to a yeshiva in Englewood, a New Jersey suburb with a sizable Orthodox Jewish community.

Qaddafi’s and his delegation will reportedly stay in Manhattan, though the precise location is as yet unknown.

† Gifted Children Left Behind (second item): Tom Loveless, who is on the K-12 education task force at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and Michael J. Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, take issue with a new study, by the Center on Education Policy claiming that the No Child Left Behind law does not give high-achieving students short-shrift as some critics feared, since the federal law does not include incentives to accelerate progress of high achievers. Writing in a New York Times op-ed, the two public education experts argue that the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is a better assessment of how gifted students are doing:

[There was] relatively little progress among our highest-achieving students (those in the top 10 percent) from 2000 to 2007, while the bottom 10 percent made phenomenal gains. For example, in eighth-grade math, the lowest-achieving students made 13 points of progress on the national-assessment scale from 2000 to 2007 - roughly the equivalent of a whole grade. Top students, however, gained just five points. …

For the most part, both high- and low-achievers made tepid annual gains. But there was one exception: In the states that already had accountability systems similar to those that would eventually be required by No Child Left Behind, there were much larger gains at the bottom than at the top.

So what does all of this mean? It is clear that No Child Left Behind is helping low-achieving students. But it is also obvious that high-achieving students - who suffer from benign neglect under the law - have been making smaller gains, much as they did before it was enacted. Alas, this drug is producing no miracles.

No doubt, some will claim victory: We are closing the achievement gap between our top and bottom students! But is that our only national goal in education? What might happen if federal law encouraged educators to improve the performance of all students?

Loveless and Petrilli write that according to the federal data, “tens of thousands of high achievers … are black, Hispanic or poor” and that schools ought to meet the educational needs of those “excelling … often against great odds.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (Nationalized Healthcare Always Leads To Rationing): Following his interview with Cheney, Wallace acknowledged that last Sunday’s interview with Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, “was an explosive interview on an explosive subject” that “raised almost as many questions as it answered” and did this follow-up report:

Both Yale and the extremists distorting this issue should be ashamed. I say this as a Muslim who supported the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's right to publish the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in late 2005 and as someone who also understands the offense taken at those cartoons by many Muslims, including my mother. After a while, she and I agreed to stop talking about them because the subject always made us argue. …

Jytte Klausen, the Danish-born author of the Yale Press's forthcoming book, "Cartoons That Shook the World," recognizes that lag. According to Yale Press's Web site, she argues that Muslim reaction to the cartoons was not spontaneous but, rather, that it was orchestrated "first by those with vested interests in elections in Denmark and Egypt, and later by Islamic extremists seeking to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya, and Nigeria."

I'm perplexed why Klausen agreed - even "reluctantly" - to Yale's decision to pull the cartoons. Ironically, she told the Guardian that she wanted to publish the cartoons to make the case "that some of them are Islamophobic, and in the tradition of anti-Semitism" - the latter a view that would hardly inflame many Muslims.

The cowardice shown by Yale Press recognizes none of the nuance that filled my conversations in Copenhagen nor discussions I had with Muslims in Qatar and Egypt during the controversy. Many told me they were dismayed at the double standards that stoked rage at these Danish cartoons yet did not question silence at anti-Semitic and racist cartoons in the region's media.

Does Yale realize that it has proven what Flemming Rose said was his original intent in commissioning the cartoons - that artists were self-censoring out of fear of Muslim radicals?