TIME magazine interviewed some of the CIA personnel involved in torturing prisoners and one of them claims that waterboarding was helpful in finding OBL:
A former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, who was investigated last year by the Justice Department for the destruction of videos showing senior al-Qaeda officials being interrogated, says that the harsh questioning of terrorism suspects produced the information that eventually led to Osama bin Laden’s death.If we limit the question to just waterboarding, it doesn't seem to have been that useful:
Jose Rodriguez ran the CIA’s CounterTerrorism Center from 2002 to 2005 during the period when top al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) and Abu Faraj al-Libbi were taken into custody and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” at secret black site prisons overseas. KSM was subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques. Al Libbi was not waterboarded, but other EITs were used on him.
“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 public interview. Rodriguez was cleared of charges in the video destruction investigation last year.
“Both KSM and al Libbi were held at CIA black sites and subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques,” Rodriguez says. “Abu Faraj was not waterboarded, but his information on the courier was key.”Now, Rodriquez was the CIA officer who ordered the destruction of the videotapes of the EIT sessions. He escaped criminal charges:
No charges in destruction of CIA videotapes, Justice Department says
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 9, 2010; 3:11 PM
The Justice Department will not file criminal charges over the destruction of CIA videotapes depicting the harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects, limiting the legal fallout from one of the Bush administration's most fraught legacies, officials said Tuesday.
After an exhaustive probe that lasted nearly three years, federal prosecutor John Durham concluded that he would not bring a criminal case against the CIA officers. The burning of the 92 tapes on Nov. 9, 2005, was authorized in a cable sent by Jose Rodriguez Jr., head of the agency's directorate of operations.
A spokesman for Durham declined to comment Tuesday, and Justice Department officials would not elaborate on Miller's statement. The statute of limitations on criminal charges for the destruction of the videotapes expired this week.
Panetta spoke with NBC News yesterday and the headline was "CIA chief: Waterboarding aided bin Laden raid" and here's the transcript, courtesy of LexisNexis:
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?
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 -- 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 in the interrogation of detainees. But we also had information from other sources as well.
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: Finer point, one final time, enhanced interrogation techniques -- which has always been a hand of handy euphemism --
PANETTA: Right.
WILLIAMS: -- in these post-9/11 years -- that includes waterboarding?
PANETTA: That`s correct.
And here's the video
Panetta also spoke with Katie Couric of CBS News and made essentially the same statement. Transcript also courtesy of LexisNexis:
COURIC: One of President Obama`s first acts was to outlaw enhanced interrogation techniques. Now, some of these were used on detainees who provided information that led to bin Laden`s whereabouts. Given that, do you think the use of these techniques should, in fact, be re-evaluated?
PANETTA: No, I really don`t. You know, I think what we had here were a lot of streams of intelligence that came together. And I think it`s probably going too far to say it all ties to just, you know, one source of information that we received. We were looking at a lot of lines of information, going back a long way.
COURIC: Having said that, some valuable information did, in fact, come from enhanced interrogation techniques.
PANETTA: Obviously there was -- there was some valuable information that was derived through those kinds of interrogations, but I guess the question that everybody will always debate is whether or not those approaches had to be used in order to get the same information. And that, frankly, is an open question.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment