Waterboarding

[skyhook77sfg]

speaking of good old keith....

time for some travelling willburys...

followed by cash's 2d to last recording...

the one with "the Beast In Me" ...

and a hot earl grey tea with honey and wild turkey

and a book it took three months to find.

bliss.

[Colonel Sun]

[Mr. Perfect]

Well if you don't consider information on the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden useful, I could see that.

[Ibrahim]

[Mr. Perfect]

You could just listen to Leon Panetta who knows where the intel came from, how it was obtained, and what it led to. He says torture and waterboarding led to Bin Laden, and cannot say if we would have got the intel any other way.

The only reason I can see to resist this fact, to close one's mind to this truth is if one were a partisan hack.

[skyhook77sfg]

now hear this....

intelligence agencies protect sources and methods above all.

the expectation that the CIA would truthfully publicly announce the source of OBL intel...

is just plain nuts.

The actual source is protected by such misdirection, a liberal scattering of red herrings...

and a new personna moving in to an average house in the Las Vegas burbs...Henderson maybe...

and more than likely $25 million in some bank somewhere...

BCCI or Nugan Hand Bank a while back...

today probably UBS ...

[Mr. Perfect]

Paranoia may destroya.

[skyhook77sfg]

NOW YOU KNOW WHY THE TORTURERS AND THEIR LOBBIES DONT WANT ANY INVESTIGATIONS WHATSOEVER....




On Monday the Washington Post reported about a number of times U.S. military officials were asked for troops or equipment to go after bin Laden, and didn't provide it, at least partly because they were distracted by Iraq. The best-known example is when bin Laden was located in a cave in Tora Bora in December 2001. Special Forces requested more troops on the ground, and didn't get them. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was asked to move his troops in, and he asked for air cover, and didn't get it. Wendy Chamberlin, then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, told the Post she later realized Franks was already "planning for Iraq," she said. "Even if he could have helped out, he was already starting to have to reshuffle." Lt. Gen. John Vines told the Washington Post in 2006 that he had troops close to catching up to bin Laden, and asked for drones to cover escape routes. "But only one drone was available -- others had been moved to Iraq," the Post reported. Bin Laden got away.

In light of the way the Bush administration clearly took the target off bin Laden's back, you'd think Bush White House leaders could at least thank President Obama for finishing the job and leave it at that. Instead former Chief of Staff Andy Card chides Obama for taking a "victory lap," while an increasingly irrelevant Dick Cheney told Fox News he's concerned the U.S. isn't using torture and other techniques his team devised:

I still am concerned about the fact that I think a lot of the techniques that we had used to keep the country safe for more than seven years are no longer available. That they've been sort of taken off the table, if you will.


http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_ ... _bin_laden


Mr Vice President Sir...

speaking frankly Sir...

you are in rectal defillade.

[Mr. Perfect]

Even if you don't believe the torture angle, every single source reporting on this says the intel was developed by the Bush administration.

Have some dignity man. Hate can do bad things to you.

[Colonel Sun]

[Colonel Sun]

[Ibrahim]

Looks like McCain is getting involved in this now, and clarifying the details with Panetta and Petraeus.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plu ... _blog.html

[Mr. Perfect]

So now the doddering warmongering senile drooling kooky McCain is an authority on something?

[Mr. Perfect]

[Mr. Perfect]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/ ... laden.html

[Captain Murphy]

[skyhook77sfg]

quite perceptive CAPN MURPHY....

oh and by he way said Hassan Ghul has disappeared without a trace....

guess he just got lost while in CISA custody...

or is $25 million richer and in Bangkok

with a new US passport

and a new name?

[skyhook77sfg]

Rumsfeld Flip-Flops: Now Says Harsh Interrogation Of Detainees Was ‘Critically Important’ In Bin Laden’s Death

Last night on Fox News’ Sean Hannity Show, former Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld backtracked on a previous statement he made about the use of information gained from torture. Rumsfeld told Newsmax this week that “beneficial” information about Osama bin Laden had not been obtained through waterboarding or “harsh treatment,” but he told Hannity the exact opposite last night:

RUMSFELD: I’m told there was some confusion today on some programs…suggesting that I indicated that no one who was waterboarded at Guantanamo provided any information on this. That’s just not true. What I said was no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the U.S. military…Three people were waterboarded by the CIA…and then later brought to Guantanamo. In fact, as you point out, the information that came from those individuals was critically important.“

Rumsfeld also agreed with Hannity that “if he [Obama] had had his way, and Democrats had their way, we wouldn’t have had this intelligence.”

Before the interview, Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn accused ThinkProgress of using his boss’s previous quote “cynically” and taking the statement “out of context.” But Rumsfeld’s original statement to Newsmax was quite clear, and the conservative outlet ran the interview under the headline, “Rumsfeld Exclusive: There Was No Waterboarding of Courier Source.”

Rumsfeld’s original position was more accurate, according to numerous sources who are familiar with the intelligence that led to Bin Laden. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor recently summed up a key flaw in the argument that waterboarding was integral to the mission, saying, “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.”

Rumsfeld and others have pointed to the comments of CIA Director Leon Panetta on NBC Nightly News this week as proof that waterboarding was instrumental in the intelligence trail that led to Bin Laden. Panetta never actually connected the dots between finding Bin Laden and waterboarding. He simply said that some of the detainees who provided key pieces of intelligence had been waterboarded at some point — an obvious fact — without saying that it was the waterboarding that caused them to turn over the information.

The New York Times’ definitive account of the intelligence trail that led to Bin Laden concluded, “harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier and exposing his hide-out.”

In fact, two of the prisoners subjected to the harshest treatment — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times — repeatedly lied under torture about the critical piece of intel about the courier. Mohammed has been frequently invoked by conservatives in recent days as the paramount example that waterboarding works. Abu Faraj Al-Libbi, another Al Qaeda leader whose usefulness has been cited by conservatives, also misled interrogators about the courier.

The detainee who provided the most important actionable intelligence about the courier, Al Qaeda operative Hassan Ghul, was not waterboarded, and was described by one official as being “quite cooperative.”

This conservative effort to reopen the torture debate appears to be little more than an attempt to attack President Obama at a moment of strength and distract from that fact that Bush failed to catch Bin Laden.

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/04/rum ... bin-laden/

[Colonel Sun]

[Mr. Perfect]

Unlike morally compromised "torture opponents" who pick and choose when they are outraged by torture (dead silence on the Clinton torture program, that was worse than the Bush one), I can simply look at the record of torture and see it certainly works. Saddam Hussein was able to get taped denunciations of the US from captured US pilots in Gulf War I, the Clinton administration was very happy with the intelligence they got from their more brutal torture program, and from Leon Panetta himself we have torture not only producing intel but a pivotal source of it in the capture for Bin Laden.

So torture does work, there is no question about that, I don't know what John McCain's experience had to do with that. In fact, the left was floating rumors during the election that he sung like a bird in captivity. So I don't know what to tell you.

So you guys are all big McCain guys now. Weird.

[Ibrahim]

[Mr. Perfect]

[Mr. Perfect]

[amos]

[Mr. Perfect]