9 GOP Senators Who Don't Closely Follow U.S. Intelligence Posted by Adam Blickstein

Manu Raju reports that 9 Republican senators, led by GOP Whip Jon Kyl and Minority Chair of the Senate Intel Committee Kit Bond, sent a letter to Eric Holder expressing concern over reports that he may name a special prosecutor to investigate officials for transgressions during the interrogation of terrorist detainees. That debate aside, the letter again contains a patently false and demonstratively manipulated assertion over the value of intelligence gathered during the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

The interrogation of KSM yielded information that was vital to apprehending other al Qaeda terrorists and preventing additional attacks on the United States, including the plot to destroy the Library Tower in Los Angeles.

This argument has been used time and time again to justify the Bush administration's use of torture, even if the facts don't back up the claim, as Timothy Noah succinctly pointed out in Slate in April:

What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument), 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, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.

Since it's clear that basic facts don't matter too much for the GOP during the health care debate (and for that matter the energy debate), why should we expect a different standard for matters of national security and counter-terrorism?  The impending reality of "death panels," the vital information gathered during the torture of high level detainees, to the GOP's singular political aspirations, they're one in the same.