 the fear the tapes might surface in some court proceeding or as reality TV and the CIA interrogators identified by hostile elements. Translation: the tapes were conclusive evidence of felonious conduct and the head of Clandestine Operations ordered them destroyed.
The White House, still incandescent with rage about the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's lack of nukes - in which the CIA was involved - is taking enormous pleasure in expressing official dismay at this attempt to purge the historical record.
The uproar has reignited the familiar debate about torture, with the emphasis on utility rather than moral principle. The retired CIA interrogator Kiriakou says that, after 45 seconds contemplation of impending water-torture, Zubaydah blabbed out al-Qaeda's plans for attack on the Christian west and thus thousands of lives were saved.
A somewhat different assessment can be found in Ronald Suskind's recent book, The One Percent Doctrine, based on many interviews with intelligence officials.
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They told Suskind the CIA team that captured Zubaydah soon determined he was not a senior al-Qaeda man and furthermore was clinically insane. Nonetheless, they grilled him with great brutality.
Frantic with pain and terror, he shrieked out one imaginary plot after another, including planned assaults on New York's water supplies, nuclear plants, shopping malls and the Brooklyn Bridge. At each disclosure, Suskind writes, "Thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each target. Thus the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
There's not much evidence that Americans are aghast at these disclosures. Mulling the matter over, one contributor to the Washington Monthly's website wrote this week: "We need to look at the nature of the threat involved, and take a consequentialist tack on the issue." If the information extracted by torturing Zubaydah saved "even one" marginal Republican House seat in 2004, he wrote, "it was worth it." 
FIRST POSTED DECEMBER 12, 2007
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Lame duck presidency lurches into farce
