Since the news of Osama bin Laden's death, Rep. Peter King (R-Douchebagington) has been all over the airwaves touting this line:
KING: Well I don’t know if everyone knows this or not, but you mentioned the fact that we obtained information several years ago, vital information about the courier for Obama [sic]. We obtained that information through waterboarding. So for those who say that waterboarding doesn’t work, who say it should be stopped and never used again, we got vital information which directly led us to bin Laden.
Sounds impressive, no?
But then here comes creepy, evil Donald Rumsfeld with this statement:
“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.”
Oh, snap!
And this from a guy who defends torture the way the Pope defends pederasts!
Also, there's this from the NY Times:
Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.
So basically, the two guys that we admit to waterboarding continued to lie under torture. So torture not only did not yield actionable intelligence, it really did just the opposite. It was only because interrogators assumed that the guys being tortured were lying that they latched on to this courier.
Not that any of this is going to stop Pete King and the FOXies from spreading the lie that torture worked.
