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Most of you? Maybe you need to re-read the thread.
Osama Bin Laden DEAD!
- Thread starter Jarod
- Start date
Most of you? Maybe you need to re-read the thread.
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So saying that you don't deny something means that the opposite is true?
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The torture program established by the CIA appears to have played a minor role, at most, in the intelligence effort that eventually lead to Osama bin Laden’s death. From the evidence released so far, electronic surveillance and old-fashioned intel methods were far more important.
Check out the timeline presented by an Obama administration official on Sunday. The trail starts with al-Qaida detainees captured in the early days of the war on terrorism, when the Bush administration authorized the CIA to use abusive methods like waterboarding to extract information. Detainees identified a courier for bin Laden as a “protégé” of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a “trusted assistant” of former al-Qaida #3 Abu Faraj al-Libbi. And they gave up the courier’s nom de guerre.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003, with al-Libbi following suit in 2005. A U.S. official tells the Associated Press reports that Mohammed gave up the courier’s nom de guerre, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, while in one of the CIA’s brutal “black site” prisons. As Marcy Wheeler notes, that’s not the same thing as saying the 183 waterboarding sessions Mohammed received led interrogators to the nom de guerre. But let’s be charitable to them and presume it did. According to the Washington Post, al-Libbi confirmed the alias as well.
From what we know so far, that’s about all waterboarding yielded for the hunt for al-Kuwaiti.
The senior administration official told reporters on Sunday that “for years, we were unable to identify his true name or his location.” It took until “four years ago” — 2007, then — for intelligence officials to learn al-Kuwaiti’s real name. By then, President Bush had ceased waterboarding and shuttered the black sites, moving the detainees within them, including Mohammed and al-Libbi, to Guantanamo Bay. In a Monday interview, Donald Rumsfeld said “normal” interrogation techniques were used at Gitmo on those detainees.
If this timeline is correct — and there may be a lot of adjustment to it in the days and years to come — then that means waterboarding and other abusive techniques failed to get the name out of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi. A New York Times account has both men claiming not to know even the courier’s nom de guerre, which actually may have counted as a kind of confirmation by omission in this case. That says something about the limits of brute force in interrogation.
It took more traditional sleuthing to get al-Kuwaiti’s real name, according to the Times. That meant putting more operatives on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan to track him, yielding a partial name. Once they had that, they unleashed “one of their greatest investigative tools“: the National Security Agency’s surveillance net. The NSA monitored email and phone traffic until they had his full name: Shaikh Abu Ahmed.
Last summer, the Associated Press reports, al-Kuwaiti/Ahmed made a fatal mistake: he called someone under NSA surveillance. After showing up on the grid, CIA operatives on the ground were able to hunt him. In July, CIA’s team of Pakistani informants tailed him, writing down his license plate number. That led them to the Abbottabad compound, which was off the communications grid to avoid precisely the mistake that al-Kuwaiti/Ahmed made. Even so, as my colleague David Axe explores in detail, lots of overhead surveillance tools helped U.S. intelligence isolate and understand the compound.
Everyone involved in the takedown of bin Laden can be proud of their contributions — especially the CIA, which has taken a ton of criticism for implementing the old torture program during the years after 9/11. And the torture question isn’t just an operational one, it’s a moral one: even had torture led directly to bin Laden, the morality of torture requires a separate moral judgment (as well as a legal one).
In this rather huge example, those questions appear less relevant. Waterboarding and other torture methods didn’t give the real name and location of the courier. Old fashioned human spying and electronic dragnets did that. For now, the most that can be said about the “enhanced interrogation program” is that it may have led to the nom de guerre of the courier, which got the ball rolling. That’s not nothing, and it complicates the operational case against torture. But even that is less than certain, and it hit its limits when trying to ascertain Ahmed’s real name.
“One would think that if so-called ‘enhanced interrogations’ provided the magic silver bullet,” writes Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, who’s expertly chronicled torture in the post-9/11 era, “and if the courier was a protégé of K.S.M.’s, then the C.I.A. might have wrapped this up back in 2003, while they were waterboarding the 9/11 mastermind a hundred and eighty-three times.”
If anything, the bin Laden hunt is a positive indicator for future intelligence efforts now that the “enhanced interrogation program” is over. Interrogations are now the province of joint FBI-CIA-military teams. And intelligence officials are now poring over a “mother lode” of captured hard drives from bin Laden’s compound to roll up other senior al-Qaida operatives. They won’t even have to simulate drowning someone to get them.
Update, 12:15 p.m.: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that the “magnificent” intelligence work that led to bin Laden isn’t a vindication of the the old torture program. “To the best of our knowledge, as the result of a look, none of it came from harsh interrogation practices,” Feinstein said.
“I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted,” she further told reporters on Tuesday, “and in my view, nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used.”
Second Update, 8:10 a.m., May 4: Jose Rodriguez, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, wants credit for the torture program in getting bin Laden. “Information provided by KSM and Abu Faraj al Libbi about Bin Laden’s courier was the lead information that eventually led to the location of [bin Laden’s] compound and the operation that led to his death,” Rodriguez tells Time in his first interview since retirement.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/surveillance-not-waterboarding-led-to-bin-laden/
Check out the timeline presented by an Obama administration official on Sunday. The trail starts with al-Qaida detainees captured in the early days of the war on terrorism, when the Bush administration authorized the CIA to use abusive methods like waterboarding to extract information. Detainees identified a courier for bin Laden as a “protégé” of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a “trusted assistant” of former al-Qaida #3 Abu Faraj al-Libbi. And they gave up the courier’s nom de guerre.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003, with al-Libbi following suit in 2005. A U.S. official tells the Associated Press reports that Mohammed gave up the courier’s nom de guerre, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, while in one of the CIA’s brutal “black site” prisons. As Marcy Wheeler notes, that’s not the same thing as saying the 183 waterboarding sessions Mohammed received led interrogators to the nom de guerre. But let’s be charitable to them and presume it did. According to the Washington Post, al-Libbi confirmed the alias as well.
From what we know so far, that’s about all waterboarding yielded for the hunt for al-Kuwaiti.
The senior administration official told reporters on Sunday that “for years, we were unable to identify his true name or his location.” It took until “four years ago” — 2007, then — for intelligence officials to learn al-Kuwaiti’s real name. By then, President Bush had ceased waterboarding and shuttered the black sites, moving the detainees within them, including Mohammed and al-Libbi, to Guantanamo Bay. In a Monday interview, Donald Rumsfeld said “normal” interrogation techniques were used at Gitmo on those detainees.
If this timeline is correct — and there may be a lot of adjustment to it in the days and years to come — then that means waterboarding and other abusive techniques failed to get the name out of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi. A New York Times account has both men claiming not to know even the courier’s nom de guerre, which actually may have counted as a kind of confirmation by omission in this case. That says something about the limits of brute force in interrogation.
It took more traditional sleuthing to get al-Kuwaiti’s real name, according to the Times. That meant putting more operatives on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan to track him, yielding a partial name. Once they had that, they unleashed “one of their greatest investigative tools“: the National Security Agency’s surveillance net. The NSA monitored email and phone traffic until they had his full name: Shaikh Abu Ahmed.
Last summer, the Associated Press reports, al-Kuwaiti/Ahmed made a fatal mistake: he called someone under NSA surveillance. After showing up on the grid, CIA operatives on the ground were able to hunt him. In July, CIA’s team of Pakistani informants tailed him, writing down his license plate number. That led them to the Abbottabad compound, which was off the communications grid to avoid precisely the mistake that al-Kuwaiti/Ahmed made. Even so, as my colleague David Axe explores in detail, lots of overhead surveillance tools helped U.S. intelligence isolate and understand the compound.
Everyone involved in the takedown of bin Laden can be proud of their contributions — especially the CIA, which has taken a ton of criticism for implementing the old torture program during the years after 9/11. And the torture question isn’t just an operational one, it’s a moral one: even had torture led directly to bin Laden, the morality of torture requires a separate moral judgment (as well as a legal one).
In this rather huge example, those questions appear less relevant. Waterboarding and other torture methods didn’t give the real name and location of the courier. Old fashioned human spying and electronic dragnets did that. For now, the most that can be said about the “enhanced interrogation program” is that it may have led to the nom de guerre of the courier, which got the ball rolling. That’s not nothing, and it complicates the operational case against torture. But even that is less than certain, and it hit its limits when trying to ascertain Ahmed’s real name.
“One would think that if so-called ‘enhanced interrogations’ provided the magic silver bullet,” writes Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, who’s expertly chronicled torture in the post-9/11 era, “and if the courier was a protégé of K.S.M.’s, then the C.I.A. might have wrapped this up back in 2003, while they were waterboarding the 9/11 mastermind a hundred and eighty-three times.”
If anything, the bin Laden hunt is a positive indicator for future intelligence efforts now that the “enhanced interrogation program” is over. Interrogations are now the province of joint FBI-CIA-military teams. And intelligence officials are now poring over a “mother lode” of captured hard drives from bin Laden’s compound to roll up other senior al-Qaida operatives. They won’t even have to simulate drowning someone to get them.
Update, 12:15 p.m.: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that the “magnificent” intelligence work that led to bin Laden isn’t a vindication of the the old torture program. “To the best of our knowledge, as the result of a look, none of it came from harsh interrogation practices,” Feinstein said.
“I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted,” she further told reporters on Tuesday, “and in my view, nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used.”
Second Update, 8:10 a.m., May 4: Jose Rodriguez, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, wants credit for the torture program in getting bin Laden. “Information provided by KSM and Abu Faraj al Libbi about Bin Laden’s courier was the lead information that eventually led to the location of [bin Laden’s] compound and the operation that led to his death,” Rodriguez tells Time in his first interview since retirement.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/surveillance-not-waterboarding-led-to-bin-laden/
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How else should it be interpreted, O Wise and Gentle One?
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Delusions of grandeur? Why not hop down to the VA hospital and get checked out?
Does this help ???? (what grade are you in this year ?)
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Of course, sarcasm would undermine your karma.
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So, you contend that Panetta says that waterboarding led to the killing of OBL?
¯¯¯̿̿¯̿̿’̿̿̿̿̿̿̿’̿̿’̿̿;810430 said:
Not really. I love sarcasm and enjoy using it. However that was a pretty straight forward post. There is also the small problem of the supposed "demand".
Where in that rather direct and truthful statement could one possibly come up with a demand from others about anything at all?
You seem to claim an amazing ability to read a book when a sentence was written, I'd love to see where the simple statement "No, nobody remembers." could in any way be construed as a "demand" on anybody at all.
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Waterboarding did not lead to Osama bin Laden’s killing, any more than any other event that took place in 2002 or 2003 led to his killing.
What led to bin Laden’s killing —inside a structure that had not been built yet, when Dick Cheney ordered US personnel to use techniques defined as torture under existing law— 7 to 8 years later, under a different administration, in a new decade, in a country whose entire system of government has changed, mired in a Taliban war as intense as the one in Afghanistan… what led to SEAL Team Six raiding that compound was all of the hard work of far more honest public servants than those who believe the US can only do well when it does the wrong thing.
The idea that torture or waterboarding were necessary, or even contributed in some indirect way, to make the investigation into bin Laden’s whereabouts a success is a smear of the worst kind, and precisely the kind of negative propaganda enemies like al Qaeda would love to be true. But it is not true. It is a perversion of the mind to which certain hardline elements are given, who believe more in the use of violence than they do in the guiding principles of American democracy.
It is also a smear against all of the men and women sacrificing their time, their quality of life, their safety and their lives, in service of the nation; it suggests they are not defending a great democracy committed at every level at every moment to upholding the rule of law, but rather that they are fighting in service of something less worthy, less noble, less in keeping with the founding values of the nation they love.
No credible authority on interrogations, on the tactical strengths of the American intelligence community or military service personnel, could stoop so low as to make the absurd claim that only as a result of torture was it possible to locate and to eliminate Osama bin Laden.
http://www.casavaria.com/cafesentido/2011/05/05/8058/bin-laden-killed-in-spite-of-torture-not-because-of-it/
What led to bin Laden’s killing —inside a structure that had not been built yet, when Dick Cheney ordered US personnel to use techniques defined as torture under existing law— 7 to 8 years later, under a different administration, in a new decade, in a country whose entire system of government has changed, mired in a Taliban war as intense as the one in Afghanistan… what led to SEAL Team Six raiding that compound was all of the hard work of far more honest public servants than those who believe the US can only do well when it does the wrong thing.
The idea that torture or waterboarding were necessary, or even contributed in some indirect way, to make the investigation into bin Laden’s whereabouts a success is a smear of the worst kind, and precisely the kind of negative propaganda enemies like al Qaeda would love to be true. But it is not true. It is a perversion of the mind to which certain hardline elements are given, who believe more in the use of violence than they do in the guiding principles of American democracy.
It is also a smear against all of the men and women sacrificing their time, their quality of life, their safety and their lives, in service of the nation; it suggests they are not defending a great democracy committed at every level at every moment to upholding the rule of law, but rather that they are fighting in service of something less worthy, less noble, less in keeping with the founding values of the nation they love.
No credible authority on interrogations, on the tactical strengths of the American intelligence community or military service personnel, could stoop so low as to make the absurd claim that only as a result of torture was it possible to locate and to eliminate Osama bin Laden.
http://www.casavaria.com/cafesentido/2011/05/05/8058/bin-laden-killed-in-spite-of-torture-not-because-of-it/
¯¯¯̿̿¯̿̿’̿̿̿̿̿̿̿’̿̿’̿̿;810431 said:
Me?....I contend thats what the present Director of the CIA said ....actually hes saying it helped but there is no way of knowing if it was absolutely necessary
Can't your read for yourself at all....must I explain every thing to you....
......I expect an email from him giving me a complete briefing soon as he has time....
Poor conservatives...
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Well....I'm sorry to say, hes getting his ass chewed out as we speak for the FACTS he made public on MSNBC.....internet cleaning will need to be done and the spin will commence, that only normal, polite interrogation was needed to persuade the Holy, religious Muslims that enjoy our hospitality in the Cuban resort of Guantanamo, to unknowingly reveal the location of OBL....that he shot is wife during the Seal raid and then accidentally shot himself in the face....details are still being worked out......but msm will co-operate with the new farce being created.....Michael Moore is already casting members for a film showing exactly how it all went down.....¯¯¯̿̿¯̿̿’̿̿̿̿̿̿̿’̿̿’̿̿;810438 said:
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Bravo-birther displays his usual sidestepping technique.
Read this, and weep.
The "debate" is over whether simulated drowning, stress positions, and other torture techniques used by the US government during the Bush Administration helped lead to bin Laden. Many Bush era officials are crowing that the "harsh interrogation" was critical to finding bin Laden.
For instance John Yoo, the Bush justice department staffer who famously wrote memos justifying the use of simulated drowning on prisoners, wrote in a Wall Street Journal column that it was "President George W. Bush, not his successor, (who) constructed the interrogation and warrantless surveillance programs that produce this week’s actionable intelligence."
Yoo's evidence for this assertion? He doesn't provide any.
The truth? Well, an important early lead did come form Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the former head of operations for Al Qaeda. Some months after Mr. Mohammed's simulated drowning sessions, or waterboarding, ended, he gave up the nicknames of some of Bin Laden's couriers during a standard interrogation.
Years of work on those nicknames eventually helped lead to Bin Laden's location. Did Mohammed's past experience of torture set the stage for his later admission? Well, one could make that argument. But it appears telling that the useful information came long after his waterboarding had ended, not during.
DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
So you found a California dictionary that created a PC definition. They forgot to change their own definition of torture because the two definitions are in conflict:
"torture: the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty"
DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
¯¯¯̿̿¯̿̿’̿̿̿̿̿̿̿’̿̿’̿̿;810373 said:How's this, Dumb Yankee?
torture (ˈtɔːtʃə)
— vb 1. to cause extreme physical pain to, esp in order to extract information, break resistance, etc: to torture prisoners 2. to give mental anguish to 3. to twist into a grotesque form
— n 4. physical or mental anguish 5. the practice of torturing a person 6. a cause of mental agony or worry
[C16: from Late Latin tortūra a twisting, from torquēre to twist]
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/torture
Waterboarding does not cause "extreme physical pain", therefore its not torture. *shrug*