WaPo's Fact Checker weighs in: Did harsh interrogation help nab bin Laden?

The press treatment of waterboarding has interested me for some time, so naturally the fact check to determine whether waterboarding helped pin down bin Laden's location piqued my curiosity.

The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler picked up with a minor war of words between former Bush administration attorney general Michael Mucasey and Sen. John McCain.  I'll start with Kessler's conclusion and work back from there:

We do not have enough information to make a definitive judgment. But it appears that Mukasey is straining to make a connection between the killing of bin Laden and the harsh interrogation techniques that appears, at best, tangential. Otherwise, he would not have had to resort to verbal sleight of hand to make his case. McCain, by contrast, appears to clearly connect the dots from the courier to bin Laden, citing information derived from conventional techniques.

At the same time, while the enhanced techniques may not have provided the Rosetta stone to bin Laden’s whereabouts, Mukasey may be right when he asserts that valuable leads in the broader war against al-Qaeda were derived through these techniques.

We probably will never know whether the same information -– or more accurate information -- could have been obtained through conventional interrogation. The use of these techniques also harmed the U.S. image overseas — another question U.S, policymakers will have to balance in the future.

Kessler did a better job than I thought at first.  The first paragraph of his concluding section made it appear that he had largely bought McCain's view and discounted Mukasey's.

Marc Thiessen's book "Courting Disaster" makes clear the role of enhanced interrogation.  It is not used to elicit information from a detainee but rather used to make detainees cooperate with "conventional techniques."  Thus every piece of information will occur as a result of using "conventional techniques."  But not every piece of information gathered using conventional techniques would necessarily obtain all the information accrued after using enhanced techniques.  In particular, the detainee might delay in revealing information minus the use of enhanced interrogation.  But it's hard to say if such delays might have obscured the trail to bin Laden.

Kessler might have been clearer about the role of enhanced interrogation, but his conclusion is substantially correct.