Somehow the Washington Post has become a full-time apologist, nay advocate, for pro-torture policies. Now yesterday they ran this virulently pro-torture piece.

After enduring the CIA’s harshest interrogation methods and spending more than a year in the agency’s secret prisons, Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called “terrorist tutorials.”

In 2005 and 2006, the bearded, pudgy man who calls himself the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks discussed a wide variety of subjects, including Greek philosophy and al-Qaeda dogma. In one instance, he scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of an earlier lecture.

Speaking in English, Mohammed “seemed to relish the opportunity, sometimes for hours on end, to discuss the inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group’s plans, ideology and operatives,” said one of two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified. “He’d even use a chalkboard at times.”

And what is the evidence of that such splendid cooperation was in fact the product of torture?

… two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified.

Note that the sources are anonymous and further they “described the sessions”; the article does not claim they were at the sessions.

By the way, even if torture “works,” it remains immoral and illegal. And any journalist who writes such a story and fails to note those considerations is a propagandist.

More from Andrew Sullivan here.

Update: And this from the Cunning Realist.