CIA Director Leon Panetta
Greg Sargent has
obtained a letter sent from CIA Director Leon Panetta to Sen. John McCain, reiterating that the path to bin Laden did not begin with the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Here are the operative three paragraphs from the letter, which represents a response from Panetta to McCain’s earler request for information about torture and Bin Laden’s death:
Nearly 10 years of intensive intelligence work led the CIA to conclude that Bin Ladin was likely hiding at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. there was no one “essential and indispensible” key piece of information that led us to this conclusion. Rather, the intelligence picture was developed via painstaking collection and analysis. Multiple streams of intelligence — including from detainees, but also from multiple other sources — led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was at this compound. Some of the detainees who provided useful information about the facilitator/courier’s role had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Whether those techniques were the “only timely and effective way” to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively. What is definitive is that that information was only a part of multiple streams of intelligence that led us to Bin Ladin.
Let me further point out that we first learned about the facilitator/courier’s nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier.
These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier’s role were alerting.
In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means.
Emphasis mine. Panetta’s account contradicts Mukasey’s claim that the trail to Bin Laden “began” with disclosures from Khalid Sheikh Muhammed that were achieved through the “pressure" of torture.
Panetta’s account also represents public, on-the-record confirmation from the CIA of — and adds new detail to — a careful and thorough investigation by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage of the New York Times, which was based on anonymous sources and concluded that torture “played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier and exposing his hide-out.” Shane and Savage also quoted unnamed sources claiming torture resulted in bad information — also confirmed in Panetta’s letter.
What we don't know, as Sargent points out, is whether legal and effective interrogation techniques would have secured the information on the courier from KSM. We can't know that now, but there's the very real possibility that torture actually slowed the hunt for bin Laden.
"I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden," said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006....
"We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information," he said.
In a 2006 longtime military intelligence officer who has extensively researched, practiced and taught interrogation techniques.
"By making a detainee less likely to provide information, and making the information he does provide harder to evaluate, they hindered what we needed to accomplish," said Glenn L. Carle, a retired CIA officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002.
What we do know, and what hasn't got enough traditional media coverage, is that torture was used to extract a false confession, and the false confession by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi "that two al-Qaeda operatives had been receiving information from Saddam Hussein about the use of chemical and biological weapons" was used by the Bush administration to build the case for invading Iraq. Had Bush's CIA really been on the hunt for bin Laden in 2002, why were they torturing al-Libi for information about Saddam Hussein?