Did Information Gained From Torture Lead to Osama Bin Laden's Death
There's yet another AP story, apparently being pushed hard by Bush-era intelligence officials, that it was the torture of KSM that led to bin Laden.After all the false and exaggerated information the Bushies fed the American public - all based on dubious sources, created out of thin air or tortured out of someone willing to say anything to get the torture to stop - there is no reason to believe the same lying dirt-bags now. Remember the very same crowd that thinks torture is the best thing since sliced bread also told us the economy was great and not to worry about deficits. Conservatives do not have principles so much as an agenda and they just say whatever they feel they need to say, including making stuff up, to justify whatever weird anti-American notion pops into there thick skulls.
In a secret CIA prison in Eastern Europe years ago, al-Qaida's No. 3 leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, gave authorities the nicknames of several of bin Laden's couriers, four former U.S. intelligence officials said. Those names were among thousands of leads the CIA was pursuing....
The revelation that intelligence gleaned from the CIA's so-called black sites helped kill bin Laden was seen as vindication for many intelligence officials who have been repeatedly investigated and criticized for their involvement in a program that involved the harshest interrogation methods in U.S. history.
"We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day," said Marty Martin, a retired CIA officer who for years led the hunt for bin Laden.
Marcy Wheeler has much more on the torture timeline that disproves this ongoing effort to credit Bush's torture policies for leading U.S. intelligence to bin Laden. She writes at emptywheel:
Here’s what a senior administration official said last night about when they got the intelligence on the courier.
Detainees gave us his nom de guerre or his nickname and identified him as both a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of September 11th, and a trusted assistant of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the former number three of al Qaeda who was captured in 2005.
Detainees also identified this man as one of the few al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden. They indicated he might be living with and protecting bin Laden. But for years, we were unable to identify his true name or his location.
Four years ago, we uncovered his identity, and for operational reasons, I can’t go into details about his name or how we identified him, but about two years ago, after months of persistent effort, we identified areas in Pakistan where the courier and his brother operated. [my emphasis]
In other words, while the CIA may have learned the courier’s nickname earlier, they didn’t learn his true name until “four years ago”–so late 2006 at the earliest. And they didn’t learn where the courier operated until around 2009.
From these dates we can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.
The assumption is, then, that either "these men didn’t know the true name of their protégé and assistant (which is highly unlikely), or they managed to withhold that information even under torture."
Marcy reads the Cheney statement saying he "assumes" that torture led to bin Laden differently because he "admits he doesn’t know where the intelligence came from." She's spot on in pointing out that the failure of Cheney to take full credit for the torture policy he loves so much, and spent so much time propagandizing. She says, since he "can’t claim definitively that the intelligence came from it, is a pretty good tell that he can’t say it did." She also points out that Donald Rumsfeld, who would have every reason to crow that the policies he supported had a good outcome, will only go so far as to say the intelligence might have come from detainees at Guantanamo.
Note clearly that neither of these two endorsing the idea that the waterboarding of KSM nine years ago—all 183 incidents of it—led to the name and location of the courier, which current intelligence officials say they learned in the last four years. It's not even clear that KSM's interrogators were even interested then in obtaining information about the couriers. The timeline, and every report that says the specific information on the courier was obtained in recent years at Guantanamo make the KSM waterboarding story incredible.
All of which makes it look like the AP is being used by these Bush-era intelligence officials to justify their illegal actions.
All of the arguments against torture that we've all used for so many years still exists: it's morally wrong and inherently anti-American; it results in false intelligence; it fuels hatred against us; it increases the likelihood that captured Americans would be tortured. That, and more, remains as true today as when the Bush administration started torturing to obtain the false evidence to justify the war in Iraq.
Dick Cheney still says "We need to keep in place those policies that made it possible for us to succeed in this case," meaning torture. He's still wrong.
Torture May Have Slowed Hunt For Bin Laden, Not Hastened It
"I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden," said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.
It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier -- information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, "they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us," Alexander told The Huffington Post.
"We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information," he said.
In a 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College, trained interrogators found that traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches are extremely effective with even the most hardened detainees, whereas coercion consistently builds resistance and resentment.
"Had we handled some of these sources from the beginning, I would like to think that there’s a good chance that we would have gotten this information or other information," said Steven Kleinman, a longtime military intelligence officer who has extensively researched, practiced and taught interrogation techniques.
"By making a detainee less likely to provide information, and making the information he does provide harder to evaluate, they hindered what we needed to accomplish," said Glenn L. Carle, a retired CIA officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002.
But the discovery and killing of bin Laden was enough for defenders of the Bush administration to declare that their policies had been vindicated.
Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president, quickly issued a statement declaring that she was "grateful to the men and women of America’s intelligence services who, through their interrogation of high-value detainees, developed the information that apparently led us to bin Laden."
John Yoo, the lead author of the "Torture Memos," wrote in the Wall Street Journal that bin Laden's death "vindicates the Bush administration, whose intelligence architecture marked the path to bin Laden's door."
Former Bush secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that "the information that came from those individuals was critically important."
The Obama White House pushed back against that conclusion this week.
"The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003," Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council, told The New York Times.
Chronological details of the hunt for bin Laden remain murky, but piecing together various statements from administration and intelligence officials, it appears the first step may have been the CIA learning the nickname of an al Qaeda courier -- Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti -- from several detainees picked up after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Then, in 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the 9/11 mastermind, was captured, beaten, slammed into walls, shackled in stress positions and made to feel like he was drowning 183 times in a month. When asked about al-Kuwaiti, however, KSM denied that the he had anything to do with al Qaeda.
In 2004, officials detained a man named Hassan Ghul and brought him to one of the CIA’s black sites, where he identified al-Kuwaiti as a key courier.
A third detainee, Abu Faraj al-Libi, was arrested in 2005 and under CIA interrogation apparently denied knowing al-Kuwaiti at all.
Once the courier's real name was established -- about four years ago, and by other means -- intelligence analysts stayed on the lookout for him. After he was picked up on a monitored phone call last year, he ultimately led authorities to bin Laden.
The link between the Bush-era interrogation regime and bin Laden’s killing, then, appears tenuous -- especially since two of the three detainees in question apparently provided deceptive information about the courier even after being interrogated under durress.
"It simply strains credulity to suggest that a piece of information that may or may not have been gathered eight years ago somehow directly led to a successful mission on Sunday. That's just not the case," said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.
But for Alexander, Kleinman and others, the key takeaway is not just that the torture didn't work, but that it was actually counterproductive.
"The question is: What else did KSM have?" Alexander asked. And he’s pretty sure he knows the answer: KSM knew the courier’s real name, "or he knew who else knew his real name, or he knew how to find him -- and he didn’t give any of that information," Alexander said.
Alexander’s book, "Kill or Capture," chronicles how the non-coercive interrogation of a dedicated al Qaeda member led to Zarqawi’s capture.
"I’m 100 percent confident that a good interrogator would have gotten additional leads" from KSM, Alexander said.
Meet The Deathers: Conservative Nut Andrew Brietbart Website Pushing Conspiracy Theory That Osama Might Not Be Dead
"This Is Crazy": The Unhinged Conservative Right's Mocking Attacks On Obama's 2007 Pakistan Policy. Will right-wing Republicans who were spreading this garbage have the moral courage to apologize and admit they were wrong.
