(updated below)

During a recent segment on CNN’s AC 360, journalist and professor Mark Danner torpedoed CNN senior political analyst David Gergen’s attempt to minimize new revelations of Bush administration CIA torture tactics released by the Obama administration.

Host Anderson Cooper and Danner first discussed the CIA torture memos, which included techniques such as waterboarding (as much as 183 times on one detainee in the same month), sleep deprivation for up to eleven straight days, and placement in a “confinement box” in which “stinging insects” were tossed to terrorize but not cause “death or severe pain.”

Then Gergen opined:

GERGEN: At the same time, he [President Obama] made a very, very calibrated decision; we’re not going to prosecute those people in the CIA who undertook this. And I think he showed some respect for the argument that Mr. Hayden and Mr. Mukasey made today in The Wall Street Journal.

That, in fact, there may have been some benefit to the United States from these interrogation techniques. And very importantly, when we sort of take this broad brush and sort of paint this as sort of villainous, that, in fact, the number of people who were interrogated with these harsh and, I think, torturous techniques was fairly limited.

It was of the thousands of people who were captured it was about some 30 or 35 whom these techniques were used. And they make the argument — and I don’t know why we should question them – that about half of what we know about Al Qaeda came out of those interrogation techniques.

First, Cooper deserves credit for not taking a generic phony Devil’s advocate stance. He actually set up Danner’s response to Gergen’s allegations with…facts and context. Refreshing, no?

Of course it would’ve been nice if Cooper confirmed these figures before airtime (doesn’t he have researchers for this?), but the intellectual honesty was refreshing all the same.

Now Danner:

Then he pointedly refuted Gergen’s claims:

Gergen accepted Danner’s correction, acknowledging that Obama never “directly approved” of or said these techniques were “useful.” Yet Gergen continued to downplay the torture committed, defended agents for just following orders and made another error for Danner to correct.

As Danner jumped on this, Cooper, once again to his credit, didn’t impede the flow of information with contrived balance nor did he bail out Gergen, his longtime CNN colleague. Rather, Cooper facilitated and contextualized Danner’s response, closing the discussion by disproving Gergen’s assertions with just the facts.

This was not your normal CNN news program segment during which two guests spout differing opinions and the host plays the “fair and balanced” referee.

Cooper’s approach in this circumstance, his effort to ferret out the facts from his guests and put those facts in context — however absurd it is that this should be unique — is unique for a CNN program, just as it still is for far too much of broadcast and cable network news shows.

On the other hand, Gergen’s repeated defense of CIA agents who tortured — they were just following the “rules,” or orders — is fairly shocking for such a student of history.

When Gergen witnessed historically racist code words being used against Obama during the 2008 campaign season, he was unequivocal in his denouncement of such age-old divisive and demeaning tactics.

But now that CIA torturers are hiding behind an historically indefensible justification for committing acts of cruelty and inhumane treatment, Gergen, along with many apologists in the media, has turned his back on history.

Nothing could put the future of the United States in more jeopardy.

UPDATE: A new Associated Press report directly dispels Gergen’s assertion that “there’s a temptation here to sort of lump Abu Ghraib, which was clear violations of the rules by a lot of other people with these more limited CIA techniques.”

From the AP report:

The brutal treatment of terror detainees and prisoners by members of the military followed directly from the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques, according to a Senate report that is likely to add fuel to the debate over the United States’ use of torture.

[...]

The report documents the Bush administration’s growing reliance on harsh interrogations that began just two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. It also ties those unyielding interrogation policies to the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military authorities at the Abu Ghraib prison as well as to interrogations at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan.

You can download the full 232-page Senate Armed Services Committee report here (Part I) and here (Part II).

UPDATE II: Peter Hart at FAIR has an excellent related catch he found in a recent New York Times article:

Today the New York Times is reporting that waterboarding was used far more often than we have been told–almost 300 times on two prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah. This stands in rather stark contrast to what we heard about the instant, positive effects of waterboarding–as the Times notes:

A former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

Of course, someone who relented in “35 seconds” would not need to be waterboarded 83 times. And as [sic] been several accounts discussed, the information Zubaydah offered was of debatable value.

UPDATE III: Richard Blair finds this bottom line in the Senate Armed Services Committee report:

[T]he whole game was initially constructed to make the linkage between bin Laden and Saddam, because U.S. intelligence could not, in the aftermath of 9/11/01, make the connection. The development of Bush administration policies on torture had very little to do with actually preventing another attack on U.S. soil.

UPDATE IV: Battochio at Vagabond Scholar has an excellent roundup of videos on torture and the ongoing “torture debate.”

Cross-posted from MediaBloodhound

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