Blaming the Messenger

Anne Applebaum writes about the underlying issue in the Newsweek flap: it was plausible.

But surely the larger point is not the story itself but that it was so eminently plausible, in Pakistan, Afghanistan and everywhere else. And it was plausible precisely because interrogation techniques designed to be offensive to Muslims were used in Iraq and Guantanamo, as administration and military officials have also confirmed.

Andrew Sullivan has made the same point before.