"Gitmo" talking point got out early on Fox - Daily Kos article completely refutes it

[underpants]

One of the first things I heard this morning at work (we usually never talk politics) was "Well Fox News said this morning that the info came from detainees at Gitmo". I knew it was BS and said, "Unlikely they have been out of the loop for too long". Then I got home and did a tiny bit of research:




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.

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.

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.



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/02/972427/-Waterboarding-did-not-reveal-OsamabinLadentrail

[Abq_Sarah]

1. From what I've read on other sources

The detainees weren't in Gitmo when the information was obtained through interrogations.

[underpants]

2. Right they are just saying "detainee".... "gitmo"..."Bin Laden" and letting people put them together

Gee haven't we seen THAT before?

[Abq_Sarah]

3. They're probably not being specific

Because of the conditions under which they received the information.

If they got info from KSM when he was in an overseas CIA prison, it's going to give certain people talking points the administration would prefer not to hand to them.

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. How does that article match up to this one?

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20110502/030e07d1-3522-44f5-a655-2bbfc203226b

[underpants]

6. That is a more timeline act-to-act account

I have read other articles very similar to that but all the mainstream ones have a couple of paragraphs giving the Bush crowd room to crow and cloud the story.

[malaise]

5. Bare lies

No way that folks who were picked up years ago had a clue about these people.

They're trying real hard.

[Contrary1]

7. Cheney can assume all he wants:

"Investigators knew the courier -- a protege of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- was "important," because a number of detainees held out on providing information about him, the senior U.S. official said.

When interrogators pushed Mohammed on the courier's identity, he "lied to protect his protege," the official said. "We knew he was lying, because we already knew (the courier) was a KSM protege," the official said. In fact, other detainees indicated that the courier could have been working for bin Laden, the official added.

While Mohammed held back on information, that in itself made intelligence personnel more interested in the courier because they knew Mohammed was lying, the official said."

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/02/bin.laden.hunt/index.html

[WilliamPitt]

8. Marked for later reading

[jimlup]

9. I was disappointed to see ABC spend so much of their special report interviewing Darth Cheney

And of course he made sure to put in his plug for torture. It was sick.