It was inevitable that the torturer enablers would seek to rehabilitate themselves at the first opportunity. And attaching their bogus claims to the killing of Osama bin Laden has provided them with it. Not only to rescue their discredited philosophy but the failed policies of George W. Bush that they promoted, wrote legal memos about and tendentiously defended.
But, as Joan McCarter has shown here, Armando has argued here and Marcy Wheeler has written here, those claims are encountering some serious headwinds.
Now the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, has added her voice to those saying the Bush administration's use of torture in black sites operated by the CIA did not contribute to finding bin Laden. In response to a reporter's questions, she said:
Absolutely not, I do not. I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted, and in my view nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used. ...
We are in the process of a big study on the detention and interrogation of the detainees on the Intelligence Committee. The Republicans have pulled out of the study. So this has been carried out by the Democratic staff essentially. They have gone through more than 3 million emails, cables, pieces of paper looking for this.
To date, the answer to your question is no. Nothing has been found to indicate this came out of Guantanamo. And people were questioned, but there were no positive answers as to the identity of this number one courier.
Of course, none of this push back will stop John Yoo, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Peter King and the rest of the cabal from continuing to craft their Orwellian claims that torture isn't torture when the United States does it, while simultaneously claiming that torture works when the United States does it.