And Andrew Malcolm notes:
The trail to Monday morning's assault on Osama's Pakistan compound began during someone else's presidency. That previous president authorized enhanced interrogation techniques which convinced folks like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to give up, among many other things, the name of their top-secret courier, now deceased. His travels ultimately led the CIA back to Osama's six-year-old suburban home.And the New York Times has the background, "Detective Work on Courier Led to Breakthrough on Bin Laden." Also, at ABC News, "Phone Call by Kuwaiti Courier Led to Bin Laden."
RELATED: Last night David Beamer, whose son Todd Beamer died fighting terrorists on Flight 93 on 9/11, told Sean Hannity that the U.S. government should continue to do what works in fighting our mortal enemies. And he's quoted, with video, at Freedom's Lighthouse:
I really wish I could have seen the look on Osama Bin Laden’s face when he realized, ‘Uh-oh – these are the Navy SEALs, and they’re right here.’ . . . He got American justice delivered by U.S. Navy SEALs. Moments thereafter, he received Divine Justice by God Almighty. . . . There’s a heaven and there’s a hell. Osama Bin Laden knows all about that now.All of this is really driving progressives crazy, like McJoan at Daily Kos, "Waterboarding did not reveal Osama bin Laden trail." Check the post for a really, er, tortured attempt to tamp down the waterboarding worked meme. Seriously. The fact that this president is simply completing the job of his predecessor drives progressives nuts.
8 comments:
I suppose "Obama's base" believed that he would give up the fight just because he is a liberal.
They have no understanding of this country.
If waterboarding did indeed contribute to bin Laden's attempted capture and now death I'll definitely reexamine my own stance on the practice Don but if you actually read the stories you link to that doesn't appear to be the case (although we may learn more later).
NYT: As Obama administration officials described it, the real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, whom the Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world.
Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
No mention of water boarding to get the courier's nickname (Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti) at Gitmo. In fact, Rumsfeld expressly denies this at Newsmax. King says that we "obtained vital information through waterboarding" KSM and al-Libi at black sites in Europe.
ABC: After the CIA captured al-Qaida's No. 3 leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he confirmed knowing al-Kuwaiti but denied he had anything to do with al-Qaida...Mohammed did not discuss al-Kuwaiti while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He acknowledged knowing him many months later under standard interrogation, they said...
So KSM didn't give us al-Kuwaiti's real name while being waterboarded. And al-Libi?
ABC: Finally, in May 2005, al-Libi was captured. Under CIA interrogation, al-Libi admitted that when he was promoted to succeed Mohammed, he received the word through a courier. But he made up a name for the courier and denied knowing al-Kuwaiti, a denial that was so adamant and unbelievable that the CIA took it as confirmation that he and Mohammed were protecting the courier.
So al-Libi didn't give us al-Kuwaiti's real name while being waterboarded either. In fact, he lied and gave us false information. It was only later that by adding more agents on the ground in Pakistan that we found out this information through informants.
O'Reilly's right about one thing: you're not going to hear that on another network because King is either ignorant of the facts or lying. But who cares, "Waterboarding Works!" Who needs actual evidence when you already "know" in your gut that it's true, right?
Still smarting I see, JBW:
Reposting Andrew Malcolm:
"The trail to Monday morning's assault on Osama's Pakistan compound began during someone else's presidency. That previous president authorized enhanced interrogation techniques which convinced folks like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to give up, among many other things, the name of their top-secret courier, now deceased. His travels ultimately led the CIA back to Osama's six-year-old suburban home."
Nothing you've cited proves otherwise. But you don't care.
Uh yeah, actually it does. The courier's nickname came from Gitmo. Neither the NYT story nor the ABC story cites waterboarding or any other "enhanced interrogation techniques" as the impetus for that information.
And the courier's real name?
NYT: By 2005, many inside the C.I.A. had reached the conclusion that the Bin Laden hunt had grown cold, and the agency’s top clandestine officer ordered an overhaul of the agency’s counterterrorism operations. The result was Operation Cannonball, a bureaucratic reshuffling that placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name.
In an opinion column that mostly berates President Obama because he wasn't actually on the helicopters with the Navy SEALs Malcolm only offers his opinion as evidence that waterboarding produced that information. He cites neither news nor government sources or evidence to back up his claim.
In fact, the only link he provides in the entire column is to himself earlier that day: The hunt began to narrow several years ago when interrogations of Guantanamo Bay detainees produced the nicknames of a pair of highly trusted couriers, used by the captured 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Bin Laden, who had learned his electronic communications could be monitored by the U.S.
It took nearly two years of CIA analysis to determine the men's real names and to begin ....
Malcolm's claim later that day that waterboarding gave us the courier's name is purely his opinion and cites no evidence of this, and neither do either of the articles you cite in your post. In fact, I cited Donald Rumsfeld denying just that on a conservative website as a counter to Malcolm's claim.
I'm not claiming that waterboarding doesn't definitively work or didn't work in this case, just that nothing you've provided proves that it does. If you can provide any proof more convincing than Malcolm's opinion for a post title like "Waterboarding Works!" within that same post you let me know.
If the use of Khmer Rouge-styled torture gets results, why not use it in the war against drugs? Or in IRS audits?
Personally, I am simply against torture. In all instances. I don't care if it gave us Bin Laden's location. Torture is absolutely morally abhorrent, in the same way as rape, and something completely contrary to the standard of human dignity appealed to by America's greatest thinkers.
This post might as well be titled "Rape Works!" and include a story about how a raped woman got pregnant.
amerika is impotent. that's why they torture........
Amerika is impotent. That's why they torture.
Post a Comment