Torture Led to the Breakthrough? C’mon!

First the unseemly partisan rush to claim ownership of a success that belongs to both the Bush and Obama administrations. Then the perverse idea that the tracking down of bin Laden could be used to justify torture. How quickly truth is abandoned for partisan advantage. The lie is easily disproved — read on — and we should be glad to learn that Americans need not resort to torture.

The element that is now attempting this history re-write is the same as that which ridiculed the notion that al Qaeda could best be defeated with the collaboration of intelligence services throughout the world — and good old-fashioned police work — rather than armies capturing territory. "The road to bin Laden began with waterboarding", says Representative Peter King (R-NY), the Chair of the House's Homeland Security Committee, he who just recently conducted a controversial witch hunt of Islam in the U.S.

We are told that water-boarding ended seven years ago, so for King to be right he would have to be saying that the Bush Administration lied to us. The source of the name of the courier who led to bin Laden's discovery was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who was water-boarded 183 times. However, former officials told the The Associated Press:

Mohammed did not discuss [the name of bin Laden's courier] while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding...He acknowledged knowing him many months later under standard interrogation.

Mark Fallon, a former interrogator and special agent in charge of the criminal investigation task force at Guantanamo Bay, said that, if the name of the courier derived from waterboarding, why did we wait seven years to act upon it? In an interview May 3rd he said:

I was privy to the information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at the time. I've investigated al Qaeda for a number of years and I'm not aware of any substantive information or intelligence that was a derivative product directly from waterboarding.

In the following interview (slide the pointer to the 1:55m mark) Donald Rumsfeld says, "anyone who suggests that the enhanced techniques -- let's be blunt, waterboarding -- did not produce an enormous amount of valuable intelligence just isn't facing the truth". There being no mention by him of intelligence leading to bin Laden, that broader claim is for another time.

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Rumsfeld is then followed (at 2:28m) by a former senior military interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander who conducted or supervised over 1300 interrogations in Iraq. He, too, asks why, if Rumsfeld is implying that waterboarding led to bin Laden, why didn't we find him long ago? Alexander confirms the disconnect between the time of waterboarding KSM and when we learned from him only the nickname of the courier.

A host of actual interrogators has since come forward to refute the likes of Rumsfeld and John Yoo, the latter the author of the tortured legal opinion that gave the go-ahead to torture. One of them even said he believed we could have gotten more information by not torturing -- that torture hardened prisoners against cooperating.

John McCain came out again against torture in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. To the claim that waterboarding led to bin Laden, he said "That is false".

Isn't that case closed? Instead we have another example of disunity in the country that is feeding a civil war of words -- a faction desperately trying to make themselves right with no hesitation of constructing lies to do so. Could they have come up with anything more grotesque to give credit to the Bush administration than America's descent into torture?