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Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free _Mother Jones Daily_. Here is torture defender — and newly minted _Washington Post_ columnist —

Marc Thiessen explaining last year how the barbaric treatment of Khalid Sheik Mohammed yielded valuable information: > Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques “led to the

> discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East Asian > operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los > Angeles.” KSM later acknowledged before a 

military commission at > Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest > building on the West Coast. That was in the _Washington Post_. Here is Tim Noah, writing in

the Post’s _Slate_ subsidiary the next day: > What clinches the falsity of Thiessen’s claim […] is chronology. > In a White House press briefing, Bush’s counterterrorism chief, > 

Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was > arrested in February 2002….But Sheikh Mohammed wasn’t captured > until March 2003. >  > How could Sheikh 

Mohammed’s water-boarded confession have > prevented the Library Tower attack if the Bush administration > “broke up” that attack during the previous year? It couldn’t, > of course.

And Jonathan Bernstein, this morning: > I just saw torture apologist Marc Thiessen on CSPAN repeating, first > of all, his argument that the Obama Administration is foolishly > 

killing, rather than torturing, too many terrorists (today’s news > apparently notwithstanding; I turned it on too late to hear his > explanation if any on that part of it), but more 

to the point his > claim that torture and only torture prevented the Library Plot in > Los Angeles from working. I guess it’s easy to see why the _Post_ wants this guy writing for them

on a weekly basis. He never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.