Trapped in their own terminal shadenfreud the Right Wing of this Nation has already shown itself completely incapable to simply admitting the truth.
Their President Failed to find, capture or kill Bin Laden, while Our President Succeeded.
They can't give Obama Credit for doing exactly what he said he would do during the campaign, when they called him Weak, Crazy and Naive for suggesting it. They can't admit that Obama made getting OBL a "Top Priority", selected which plan to use and personally Green Lit and Monitored the Operation while their President said "He really didn't think about (bin Laden)" that much" and he Shutdown the Bin Laden Unit of the CIA that had been started by President Clinton. They can't admit that Bush let OBL Escape at Tora Bora. They can't admit that when Clinton tried to get OBL way back in 1998 he was accused of trying to "Wag the Dog" away from the Lewinsky mess.
But probably the worse of this pile of self-aggrandizing delusions is the suggestion that We Should Re-instate the Bush Torture Program because that was how we finally got bin Ladin.
It happened last night when House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-Askaban) made the following claim.
KING: Well I don’t know if everyone knows this or not, but you mentioned the fact that we obtained information several years ago, vital information about the courier for Obama [sic]. We obtained that information through waterboarding. So for those who say that waterboarding doesn’t work, who say it should be stopped and never used again, we got vital information which directly led us to bin Laden.
O’REILLY: Wow! Let me stop you there. I did not know that and I’m sure most of my audience didn’t know that. Explain how that went down. How did we get that information, where did it come from, was it from Guantanamo Bay?
KING: It came from an overseas prison where Khaled Sheik Mohammed was being interrogated. Waterboarding was used, and it was during the interrogation of Khaled Sheik Mohammed, through waterboarding, that this information was learned.
O’REILLY: KSM gave it up? Mohammed himself gave it up?
KING: KSM gave us the first lead.
As I'm typing this Michael Isikoff is on MSNBC with Contessa Brewer stating that when they brought the codename of key courier to KSM, he denied knowing him and refused to reveal his actual name.
The fact is the CIA didn't get the courier's ID from KSM or through Waterboarding - they got it through standard surveillance.
The C.I.A actually obtained the courier’s name by placing “more agents in the field” in 2005 and “intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the [courier's] family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name.”
Even Donald Rumsfled has stated that Waterboarding was NOT a factor in gaining the key formation that led to OBL.
“The United States Department of Defense did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone. It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.”
This of course, has not deterred King one bit.
As many have noted, part of the key intelligence flaws that led us down the blind alley of Iraq was generated by the Torture of Ibn Sheik al Libi.
No one has yet offered any validated evidence that torture produces reliable intelligence. While torture apologists frequently make the claim that torture saves lives, that assertion is directly contradicted by many Army, FBI, and CIA professionals who have actually interrogated al Qaeda captives. Exhibit A is the torture-extracted confession of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al Qaeda captive who told the CIA in 2001, having been "rendered" to the tender mercies of Egypt, that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda to use WMD. It appears that this confession was the only information upon which, in late 2002, the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state repeatedly claimed that "credible evidence" supported that claim, even though a now-declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report from February 2002 questioned the reliability of the confession because it was likely obtained under torture. In January 2004, al-Libi recanted his "confession," and a month later, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements.
Torture is what Bush relied upon and fed to Colin Powell in order to present of pack of Lies to the UN. There were no WMD's or mobile labs (which we're falsely told by paid informant Curveball), there was no Nuclear Program in Iraq (which we had heard about through the Niger Forgery) and there were no active or operational links between Iraq and al Qeada (which were provided via the torture of al-Libi and another forgery by Iraq Intel head Habbush claiming yet again that Saddam had Trained the 9/11 Hijackers.
the Head of the Senate Intel Committee says King is wrong.
Bush got it wrong, he got yet another 4,000 Americans killed, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and wasted a $1 Trillion based on False Torture Evidence.
Obama got it right without using any of that.
Admit it. Swallow it. Live with it.
Vyan