The chain of clues that helped the experts gather information on Bin Laden undoubtedly began with human intelligence.
But the question currently being posed in Washington is did the chain begin with information gleaned from “enhanced interrogation” or waterboarding, the Bush-era simulated drowning technique that both President Obama and CIA chief Leon Panetta have condemned as torture?
Republicans are crowing over the killing. Just hours after US Navy Special Operations Forces successfully raided Bin Laden’s lair, former US Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News that the operation would not have been possible without intelligence gathered with harsh interrogation techniques promoted by the Bush Administration after 9/11.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee who last month held Congressional hearings on the “radicalization of the American Muslim community,” told CBS News that Bin Laden would not have been killed without the use of harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding.
And a retired CIA officer Marty Martin, who for years led the hunt for Bin Laden, also says techniques such as waterboarding played a direct role in leading forces to him, although he admitted to the London-based Guardian newspaper that key information was obtained without the use of such methods.
US officials have previously acknowledged that two “high-value” Al-Qaeda suspects with close ties to bin Laden — 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj Al-Libi, who ran the terrorist group’s operations after Mohammed’s capture — revealed information about a trusted Bin Laden courier.
The courier’s identity was considered critical to locating Bin Laden and the Abbottabad compound.
Both men were held in so-called “black sites” — secret prisons run by the CIA that were located outside US territory and where interrogators employed unusually coercive, or “enhanced,” techniques that fell outside traditional interrogation guidelines.
These techniques included prolonged isolation, shackling prisoners in stressful positions, and the simulated drowning process known as waterboarding.
Seeking a legal basis for these enhanced interrogations, the Bush administration produced what came to be dubbed as the “Torture Memos,” a series of 2002 directives written by US Justice Department official John Yoo justifying the use of mental and physical torment in terrorist interrogations.
Barack Obama rejected the “Torture Memos” when he became president in 2009 and reversed most Bush-era interrogation policies.
Yoo no longer works for the Justice Department. But in a commentary in “The Wall Street Journal,” he praised the Bush administration’s “intelligence architecture” for “marking a path to Bin Laden’s door.”
Many here, however, argue that the information gained from Mohammed and Al-Libi was just a small piece of a large puzzle, and that it was the years of traditional interrogations and investigative work that ultimately led to Bin Laden’s detection nearly a decade after 9/11.
Some experts here also insist that a closer look at prisoner interrogations suggests that the harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier and exposing his hideout.
One detainee who apparently was subjected to some tough treatment provided a crucial description of the courier, according to current and former officials briefed on the interrogations. But the two prisoners who underwent some of the harshest treatment — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times — repeatedly misled interrogators on the courier’s identity.
The use of coercive interrogation is prohibited by international law, and torture bans are universal.
Martin Scheinin, who in July ends an eight-year term as the United Nations’ special rapporteur on rights and counterterrorism, says that the American use of enhanced interrogation and secret sites opened a Pandora’s box for the rest of the world by suggesting that torture was justifiable.
Scheinin told reporters in New York this week that he believes Bin Laden’s capture was based on intelligence gained strictly through legal means, and that the world should now follow the US example in turning its back on torture.
