It's Settled. Bin Laden Was Captured Because of Torture Techniques

[Solomon]

And Obama profitted from the very policy he fought against.

So says Saint Hannity. And --- wait for it - and as a side benefit --

this means we should keep on using torture and do it even more.

[iwishiwas]

1. I read that Rush said the same.

[Drale]

2. Where did this info come from

I had heard that the CIA got the information last year in Pakistan, it took till January to confirm and it they put the plan in action this week.

[alcibiades_mystery]

15. Nowhere

They simply used the following known items to speculate:

1) Detainees at Gitmo didn't want to discuss The Courier. From this reluctance, they deduced that The Courier was important.
2)

Oh, wait, there is no 2). That's the only information we have relating to detainees at Gitmo, via Gloria Berger of CNN. So, from that reported fact, the right wing is speculating widely on tools.

Never mind that simply deducing his importance doesn't bring you to an actual location. Indeed, it doesn't even tell you his real name (all they had at that point was a code name). So, yeah, no.

[smirkymonkey]

3. I agree- Let's start by torturing Sean Hannity.

[Distant Observer]

4. Just the OPPOSITE. The facination with info from TORTURE distracted from real on the ground intel

[RainDog]

5. so nice to see republicans standing by their war crimes

because the reality is that none of us knows what could have been done without becoming monsters. but the right wingers chose to cross that line - they were founts of false intel for years - so who knows how much time and life was wasted chasing after every tortured claim.

[Solomon]

6. Of course it goes without saying,

We should have kept the body and not dumped it.

I don't think I need to say that had we kept it, Hannity would have said we should have dumped it.

[Johnny2X2X]

7. Keep it up

They are spinning this a million ways in an effort to deflect credit from Obama.

I challenge all DUers to meet them everywhere, in every blog, in every comment section. The facts are easily proven. Keep up the good work!!!

[Proud Liberal Dem]

8. Torture? When?

Did they say? If we had this intel while Bush was in office (assuming-as far as we know- that it was the only time torture was actually occurring), why the heck didn't they act on it then? It's been over two years since Bush was in office. :shrug: Are they really acknowledging: a.)torture was involved and b.)they had intel on Bin Laden's whereabouts they apparently didn't follow up on (not surprising, of course, given the August 2001 PDB)?

:wtf:

[JVS]

9. What did they do? Put some guy's balls in a vice from 2002-2010 until he talked?

[Bold Lib]

10. It would appear that information obtained in 2005 through waterbording

techniques did start the chain of information that led to finding and killing OBL yesterday.

[Solomon]

11. Oh boy.

What a crock of crap. Drank the koolaid did you. Can't blame you. Need something to wash that crap down.

[Bold Lib]

12. It does appear so. You have an explanation of how the Gitmo info

was obtained in 2005? Do you pose that someone was asked using "pretty please" and they gave up the information?

[tabatha]

16. Apparentltly, they did not torture everyone.

And those that they did not torture, gave far more information than those that were.

And since you did not know that, you are just making shit up.

[RobinA]

13. I Figured

this was coming.

[alcibiades_mystery]

14. No evidence whatsoever to support that claim

Just the usual irresponsible Fox speculation...in their own ideology's favor, of course.

[Jack_DeLeon]

17. I'm fine with that...

I've got no problem with foreign terrorists being tortured.

If the the info we used to kill Bin Laden was acquired through such means then I'm glad we had been doing it.

IMO American's have the rights protected by our Constitution, foreign terrorists should have no rights.

[underpants]

18. I heard this first thing at the office "Well Fox news this morning said..."

I nicely dismissed. I knew it was Fox News bullshit.



I was correct.


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