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Water boarding to gain valuable information? Hell, THAT'S a crime !!!

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They all reported a claim made by a country with a very vested interest in him not being found or looked for. Never was the story confirmed - a detail conspiracy fans like to jump past.

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... C.I.A. interrogators were ordered to waterboard one of the captives despite their belief that he had no more information to divulge.

According to many Bush administration officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and some intelligence officers who are critics of the coercive methods, the C.I.A. program would also produce an invaluable trove of information on Al Qaeda, including leads on the whereabouts of important operatives and on terror schemes discussed by Al Qaeda. Whether the same information could have been acquired using the traditional, noncoercive methods that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military have long used is impossible to say, and former Bush administration officials say they did not have the luxury of time to develop a more patient approach, given that they had intelligence warnings of further attacks.
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This issue could be put to an end quickly with the release of such information. Either it was an effective method or it was not.

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The torture program established by the CIA appears to have played a minor role, at most, in the intelligence effort that eventually lead to Osama bin Laden’s death. From the evidence released so far, electronic surveillance and old-fashioned intel methods were far more important.

The trail starts with al-Qaida detainees captured in the early days of the war on terrorism, when the Bush administration authorized the CIA to use abusive methods like waterboarding to extract information. Detainees identified a courier for bin Laden as a “protégé” of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a “trusted assistant” of former al-Qaida #3 Abu Faraj al-Libbi. And they gave up the courier’s nom de guerre.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003, with al-Libbi following suit in 2005. A U.S. official tells the Associated Press reports that Mohammed gave up the courier’s nom de guerre, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, while in one of the CIA’s brutal “black site” prisons. As Marcy Wheeler notes, that’s not the same thing as saying the 183 waterboarding sessions Mohammed received led interrogators to the nom de guerre. But let’s be charitable to them and presume it did. According to the Washington Post, al-Libbi confirmed the alias as well.

From what we know so far, that’s about all waterboarding yielded for the hunt for al-Kuwaiti.

The senior administration official told reporters on Sunday that “for years, we were unable to identify his true name or his location.” It took until “four years ago” — 2007, then — for intelligence officials to learn al-Kuwaiti’s real name. By then, President Bush had ceased waterboarding and shuttered the black sites, moving the detainees within them, including Mohammed and al-Libbi, to Guantanamo Bay. In a Monday interview, Donald Rumsfeld said “normal” interrogation techniques were used at Gitmo on those detainees.

If this timeline is correct — and there may be a lot of adjustment to it in the days and years to come — then that means waterboarding and other abusive techniques failed to get the name out of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi. A New York Times account has both men claiming not to know even the courier’s nom de guerre, which actually may have counted as a kind of confirmation by omission in this case. That says something about the limits of brute force in interrogation.

It took more traditional sleuthing to get al-Kuwaiti’s real name, according to the Times. That meant putting more operatives on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan to track him, yielding a partial name. Once they had that, they unleashed “one of their greatest investigative tools“: the National Security Agency’s surveillance net. The NSA monitored email and phone traffic until they had his full name: Shaikh Abu Ahmed.

Last summer, the Associated Press reports, al-Kuwaiti/Ahmed made a fatal mistake: he called someone under NSA surveillance. After showing up on the grid, CIA operatives on the ground were able to hunt him. In July, CIA’s team of Pakistani informants tailed him, writing down his license plate number. That led them to the Abbottabad compound, which was off the communications grid to avoid precisely the mistake that al-Kuwaiti/Ahmed made. Even so, as my colleague David Axe explores in detail, lots of overhead surveillance tools helped U.S. intelligence isolate and understand the compound.

Everyone involved in the takedown of bin Laden can be proud of their contributions — especially the CIA, which has taken a ton of criticism for implementing the old torture program during the years after 9/11. And the torture question isn’t just an operational one, it’s a moral one: even had torture led directly to bin Laden, the morality of torture requires a separate moral judgment (as well as a legal one).

In this rather huge example, those questions appear less relevant. Waterboarding and other torture methods didn’t give the real name and location of the courier. Old fashioned human spying and electronic dragnets did that. For now, the most that can be said about the “enhanced interrogation program” is that it may have led to the nom de guerre of the courier, which got the ball rolling. That’s not nothing, and it complicates the operational case against torture. But even that is less than certain, and it hit its limits when trying to ascertain Ahmed’s real name.

“One would think that if so-called ‘enhanced interrogations’ provided the magic silver bullet,” writes Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, who’s expertly chronicled torture in the post-9/11 era, “and if the courier was a protégé of K.S.M.’s, then the C.I.A. might have wrapped this up back in 2003, while they were waterboarding the 9/11 mastermind a hundred and eighty-three times.”

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“We had multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation… clearly some of it came from detainees [and] they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees,” Panetta told NBC News anchor Brian Williams.

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"In the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information and that was true here," he told NBC News. "It's a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got. I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees."

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"Whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always gonna be an open question," Panetta said.

"In the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information and that was true here," Panetta said. "We had a multiple source — a multiple series of sources — that provided information with regards to the situation. Clearly some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees but we also had information from other sources as well."
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Under questioning by a committee member, Holder said he did not know whether information helpful to the search for bin Laden was gained through harsh interrogation techniques of al-Qaida suspects.

But was it harsh interrogation that led to the critical information? The identity and whereabouts of the courier came to light only years later, after the enhanced interrogation had stopped.

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