Originally Posted by red66
How the CIA Broke the 9/11 Attacks Mastermind - The Blotter
If we're going to call stuff "facts", let's at least be accurate.
1) Panetta and the CIA said it was a part of what got us UBL, not the entirety of it. How much of it was waterboarding Now--what I said above was an opinion on my part--not fact. I'll clearly delineate that for everyone's finer points of what I said. And I did not claim it as fact. My opinion is based off of...
2) Read the ABC article above. It wasn't the "waterboarding" itself (note at the end of the article that it took 183 waterboarding sessions). It ended up being the humiliation of it being witnessed by a WOMAN, once. He didn't give up any information related to UBL until several months after he broke due to being waterboarded in front of a woman, and he gave it up in the course of normal interrogation techniques.
And before this gets quoted from the article:
What was so different about this one time that broke him? A woman was present. So--as I read it, KSM was too proud to admit to interrogators that it was the shame of a woman witnessing him being belittled and abused in that way that caused him to break. If a woman viewing that was his ultimate shame, you think that is going to be something he freely admits, especially since he doesn't want it to happen ever again? Because I don't.A current CIA official says that KSM actually told interrogators the only reason he confessed was because of the water-boarding.
Phone call by Kuwaiti courier led to bin Laden - Yahoo! News
The above article says THE key piece of information was the slip-up by UBL's courier. A US official in that article says "Hassan Ghul was the linchpin". Hassan Ghul gave up the courier and al-Libi. Al-Libi then gave up the courier, al-Kuwaiti.
Keep in mind this too in relation to KSM (from the AP/Yahoo article):
Agree/disagree, that's fine--I don't care. I honestly don't. But I think by the above that my opinion is at least a valid one, because no one knows for sure what worked/what didn't.After the CIA captured al-Qaida's No. 3 leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he confirmed knowing al-Kuwaiti but denied he had anything to do with al-Qaida. ...
Mohammed did not discuss al-Kuwaiti while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He acknowledged knowing him many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.
At the end of the day--we got the ******* and I'm one happy American, as all of you are, no matter how it all transpired.
Bookmarks