The CIA Reportedly Lied About How We Got Bin Laden [Enhanced Interrogation Didn't Do It]

After Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011, top CIA officials secretly told lawmakers that information gleaned from brutal interrogations played a key role in what was one of the spy agency's greatest successes.

Then-CIA Director Leon Panetta repeated that assertion in public, and it found its way into a critically acclaimed movie about the operation, "Zero Dark Thirty," which depicts a detainee offering up the identity of bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, after being tortured at a secret CIA interrogation site.

As it turned out, bin Laden was living in al-Kuwaiti's walled family compound, so tracking the courier was the key to finding the Al Qaeda leader.

But the CIA's story, like the Hollywood one, is just not true, the Senate report on CIA interrogations concludes in a 14,000-word section of the report's public summary.

"A review of CIA records found that the initial intelligence obtained, as well as the information the CIA identified as the most critical or the most valuable on Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, was not related to the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques," the Senate investigation found.

CIA officials disagree, and maintain that detainees subjected to coercive tactics provided crucial details.

"It is impossible to know in hindsight whether we could have obtained ... the same information that helped us find bin Laden without using enhanced techniques," the agency said in its written response.

I was thinking more along the lines of some fabricated “bugging”. Why would the DOJ alert her about alleged CIA concerns of illegality with Senate investigations, and why would the CIA alert her they had snooped the investigators computers. Seems clear ‘someone’ wanted her PO’d enough to release it.

And the media ignores the biggest CIA operation under Democrat President Lyndon Johnson.

Phoenix was a program headed by the CIA, in conjunction with US Special Forces and Australian and South Vietnamese commandos, during the Vietnam War. Its purpose was simple: assassination. And although this was a military unit, their targets weren’t military, but civilian.

From 1965 to 1972, Phoenix was involved in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of thousands upon thousands of citizens. People deemed critical to the infrastructure of the Viet Cong, or thought to have knowledge of VC activities, were rounded up and taken to regional interrogation centers, were they were subjected to: “rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock . . . rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the ‘water treatment’; the ‘airplane’ in which the prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners…”

http://listverse.com/2013/05/25/10-dirty-secret-cia-operations/

Who to believe?

Intelligence is like a jigsaw puzzle. You need a large number of pieces to start to see the picture, but even the smallest piece may be the key.

It is very likely intelligence gathered from both standard and enhanced interrogation was required to get enough pieces to figure out the Where is Bin Laden puzzle.

We know Abu Zubaydah and KSM gave up nothing under standard interrogation. We know they gave up significant information under enhanced interrogation. But was the information new and relevant, or irrelevant or duplicative?

A reasonable person would assume such high level people would have useful information that others would not have. But reasonable people are hard to find nowadays.

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