The soon-to-be-released Senate Intelligence committee report says that torture didn’t lead to the capture of Bin Laden. The CIA claims that the Senate report is wrong, and pushes its message out through news interviews, pro-torture propaganda tv shows such as 24, pro-torture movies like Zero Dark Thirty and video games. But former CIA director Leon Panetta said that torture did not help get Bin Laden.
In 2011, John Brennan agreed:
White House deputy national security advisor John Brennan Tuesday knocked down the myth that waterboarding provided crucial intelligence that led to the location of Osama bin Laden.“So we’ve been talking about the different details and methods that lead up to this moment, and obviously there is word out today that waterboarding played a very big role or role in actually getting the information,” MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski told Brennan. “Is that the case?”“Not to my knowledge,” Brennan explained.
Brennan is now the current director of the CIA.Likewise, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld — who had a big hand in the torture program —stated:
“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.”
Senator Lindsey Graham — a vocal proponent of waterboarding— said:
This idea we caught bin Laden because of waterboarding I think is a misstatement. This whole concept of how we caught bin Laden is a lot of work over time by different people and putting the puzzle together. I do not believe this is a time to celebrate waterboarding, I believe this is a time to celebrate hard work.
The New York Times noted:
“The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003,” said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council. “It took years of collection and analysis from many different sources to develop the case that enabled us to identify this compound, and reach a judgment that Bin Laden was likely to be living there.”
Huffington Post reported:
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, produced a 263-page report in 2009 on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody in the years following 9/11. He too dismissed the idea that the interrogation techniques used at that time were efficacious. “If they had any information under the Bush administration that could have led to bin Laden it would have been terribly neglectful for them not to use it,” Levin noted in an interview on the “Bill Press Show.”The confirmation of the courier’s significance appears to have come in 2004, from an al Qaeda operative who was not waterboarded: Hassan Ghul.
Dan Froomkin argued that — rather than helping catch Bin Laden — torture actually delayed by years more effective intelligence-gathering methods which would have resulted in finding Bin Laden: