Marcy Wheeler: The Osama Bin Laden Trail Shows Waterboarding Didn't Work

[Hissyspit]

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/05/02/the-osama-bin-laden-trail-shows-waterboarding-didnt-work/

The Osama bin Laden Trail Shows Waterboarding Didn’t Work

By: emptywheel Monday May 2, 2011 1:22 pm

- snip -

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.

With al-Libi, the connection between whatever torture he experienced and this intelligence is less clear (since he was first detained in 2005), but even with al-Libi, it appears clear he either never revealed the courier’s real name or only did so after he had been in custody for a year, and almost certainly until after he arrived in Gitmo.

Update: Putting the AP’s reporting here together with the DAB, it seems like al-Libi did give up the name, perhaps earlier than reported. But still not waterboarding. 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.

In fact, two people who normally would be crowing about the success of torture are not now doing it. Donald Rumsfeld suggests the discovery of OBL came from intelligence gained at Gitmo (therefore, not in Poland or Romania). And while Cheney assumes enhanced interrogation aka torture led to OBL, he admits he doesn’t know where the intelligence came from; given that he was ordering up propaganda reports along the way to justify his torture program, yet can’t claim definitively that the intelligence came from it, is a pretty good tell that he can’t say it did.

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[seabeyond]

1. exactly. reinforces, torture fails. as every expert states. nt

[NYC_SKP]

2. K/R (nt)

[rfranklin]

3. But the MSM will trumpet the apologists until the public believes...

that it was waterboarding Khalid lead directly to the compound. Soon after that they will convince everyone that George W. Bush was wielding the M60 that killed OBL.

[nashville_brook]

4. k and r

[leveymg]

5. If the reports are correct the information was obtained in 2007, waterboarding did not play a role,

and may actually have hindered the ability of key figures to accurately recall details.

[crickets]

6. Needs to be said over and over. K&R