Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
There is an AP report that received a lot of attention on Monday that was published on the Arizona Daily Star front page on Tuesday. Tracking of key aide led US to bin Laden.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, Torture Memos author John Yoo, and a parade of former Bush administration national security officials made the rounds in the right-wing noise machine on Monday claiming that "enhanced interrogation techniques" (waterboarding), i.e., illegal acts of turture under U.S. and international law and treaty obligations that also constitute a war crime, should be credited with leading to a key piece of intelligence that led to locating Osama bin Laden. They referenced this AP article, in part, in support of their tortured logic.
The key passage of the AP report that Cheney and other Bush torture policy architects rely on is this, Tracking of key aide led US to bin Laden:
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.
Ahmed became a particular interest when another detainee, Abu Faraj al-Libi, told interrogators that when he was promoted to succeed Mohammed as al-Qaida's operational leader he got the word through a courier. Only bin Laden would have given al-Libi that promotion, CIA officials believed.
If they could find the courier, they'd find bin Laden.
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.
Ah, but the "money quote" paragraph of the AP report follows immediately after this passage:
[Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.
The facts are the facts. Despite equivocation by the AP reporters, there is no room for debate. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, despite the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Waterboarded 183 Times in One Month. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation. Just as the national security experts involved in Mohammed's interrogation have stated publicly in testimony before Congress.
Let me emphasize this point once again: Waterboarding did not reveal Osama bin Laden trail (Joan McCarter at Daily Kos):
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:
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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.
Exactly right. The architects of the Bush administration torture policies still live under the threat of being prosecuted for their crimes one day, and they are still trying to justify that the ends — however tortured their logic — justifies their illegal means. It does not. Illegal torture did not produce actionable or credible intelligence. Standard interrogation techniques did.
There but for the unwillingness of the Obama administration to prosecute members of the former administration for illegal torture, these men remain free to spin their lies and tortured logic. They should not enjoy the complicit assistance of the "lamestream media."
UPDATE: "More and more evidence suggests a key piece of intelligence — the first link in the chain of information that led U.S. intelligence officials to Osama bin Laden — wasn't tortured out of its source. And, indeed, that torture failed to produce it." Senate Intel Chair: Torture Did Not Lead To Bin Laden In Any Way | TPMDC:
"To the best of our knowledge, based on a look, none of it came as a result of harsh interrogation practices," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a wide-ranging press conference.
Moreover, Feinstein added, nothing about the sequence of events that culminated in Sunday's raid vindicates the Bush-era techniques, nor their use of black sites — secret prisons, operated by the CIA.
"Absolutely not, I do not," Feinstein said. "I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted, and in my view nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used."
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However, multiple reports preceding Feinstein's remarks suggest that waterboarding failed to produce the key piece of information — bin Laden's courier's nom de guerre.
Feinstein went even further, claiming that change to U.S. intelligence processes ushered in by the Obama administration were seminal in capturing bin Laden.
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Moreover Feinstein claimed, the Obama administration's decision to reconstitute the CIA's bin Laden unit, which the Bush administration shuttered in 2005, was a key factor. "I think it was very crucial," she said. "I mean this has been there for a substantial period of time. People become experienced with the intelligence."
UPDATE: Donald Rumsfeld threw cold water on the new talking point yesterday, noting that Bush-era torture policies were not responsible for obtaining the information.