Torture had absolutely nothing to do with killing Osama bin Laden. Nothing. Zero. Ziilch. Nada.

[kpete]

It's time to tear down a myth right now before it spreads.
by Will Bunch


Torture had absolutely nothing to do with killing Osama bin Laden. Nothing. Zero. Ziilch. Nada. In fact, it was during the era of waterboarding and other "extreme interrogation" methods that we commonly call torture (at least when other nations do it) that the trail for bin Laden grew ice cold. It was in the years that the government changed course and stopped torturing -- beginning with George W. Bush's second term and continuing into the Obama era -- that the hunt for the 9/11 mastermind got back on track: The tools involved were traditional, legal methods of interrogation, improving our human intelligence network in Pakistan, high-technology including wiretapping of foreign terror suspects (not law-abiding American citizens) and satellite surveillance.



Remember, there are two huge arguments why using torture is wrong. The first is, quite simply, is that torture is both illegal -- as marked in the United States both by a history of treating waterboarding as unlawful and under the United Nations Torture Convention signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 -- and immoral.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1356870
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/greenwald-us-bound-treaty-prosecute-t

The second reason -- which comes into play, frankly, because so many people ignore the first reason -- is that torture doesn't even work; frequently, it causes inmates looking to end the painful process to blurt out false and counter-productive information, and many top interrogators say they typically get info by gaining an inmate's trust, not by beating the living daylights out of him.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-20/torture-doesnt-work/

Over the last three or four years, even as it became clear that a) the waterboarding of captured terrorists like 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and harsh interrogation of other suspects at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere yielded no useful results and b) the use of torture by a nation that had long advertised itself as a beacon of human rights caused serious damage to America's reputation, the architects of the Bush-era torture policy like legal justifier John Yoo and their allies grew even more aggressive in their defense of the practice, seeking in part to make sure they were never punished for their crime.

more:
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/?c=r

(they HAVE to justify their WAR CRIMES!!!)


..................
TECHNOLOGY NOT TORTURE
HIGH TECH DID OSAMA IN
Courier forgot to shut down phone
http://www.philly.com/

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. From your lips to the right-wing sow's ear.

[crickets]

3. The war criminals are trying to defend the indefensible (again) and

trying very hard to grab some credit, any credit at all for bin Laden's death. Sick.

[Distant Observer]

4. A real danger. The RW will do anything to undermine Obama credit

[crickets]

6. True.

It's mind boggling which straw they're grabbing to try to do it.

[deaniac21]

5. What he said....

BRIAN WILLIAMS: I'd like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after bin Laden?

LEON PANETTA: You know Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information, and that was true here. We had a multiple source -- a multiple series of sources -- that provided information with regards to this situation. Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees. But we also had information from other sources as well. So, it's a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.

WILLIAMS: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was in part among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?

PANETTA: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I'm also saying that, you know, the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.

WILLIAMS: So, finer point, one final time, enhanced interrogation techniques -- which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years -- that includes waterboarding?

PANETTA: That's correct.