Uh…intelligence was pieced together in the Second World War too, you know. If it’s true that it really took 8 years to figure this out, we’re stupid.
As is typical, this primarily-GOP led assertion is the opposite of the truth.
So, he apparently withheld the information while being waterboarded, and revealed it later, under standard interrogation techniques.
See also, again, Steve Benen:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_05/029251.php
Really, at a meta-level, I continue to wonder why anyone would believe people who routinely tell them things that are just not true. Is there no end to the gullibility of people who pay attention to the right wing?
But the waterboarding softened him up, right?
So I guess we are now discussing the use of enhanced interrogation techniques in general . . .
I love how some people on a messageboard decide they are experts on something simply because they’ve read some news articles about it.
My position is that first the politicians decide whether enhanced interrogation techniques can be used or not, and then the interrogators get to decide which techniques to use in a specific situation with a specific detainee. My opinion about what works and what doesn’t based on reading news articles is completely meaningless. My view on what is “moral” or “immoral” (if I were to even use those words) is also completely meaningless.
In this specific case, even if KSM didn’t reveal any useful info while being waterboarded, that doesn’t mean that waterboarding was not useful in the overall program of obtaining information from KSM. None of us are qualified to decide that question–any of our opinions on that would be about as useful as my dog’s opinion about which movie to watch.
There is a speculative explanation for the time lag, by a happy coincidence, it fits my preferred narrative: KSM didn’t know the info was important, nor did his interrogators. Or, perhaps more likely, at the time the courier wasn’t the courier, just one of many. Just another name amongst many, many names and most of them fake, nom de guerre, as it were.
KSM was the mastermind of 9/11? Then KSM was the mastermind of a plot that shouldn’t have worked, it was insanely complicated and predicated on stupid assumptions, first and foremost, that the cockpit doors were not locked. They weren’t, and I have never understood why they weren’t, seeing as we have a history of airplane hijackings going back fifty years. And sending suspicious characters to obtain flight training that excluded take-off and landing? You gotta be kidding me.
Tom Clancy would never have touched this plot for a story line, its too stupid, nobody would have believed it.
Another point, oft repeated. It is standard practice for clandestine terrorist organizations, going back at least as far as Lenin’s revolutionary bolshevik cadres: if you don’t know where one of your people are, he is captured. You assume he has been, or is being, tortured. You assume that he will give up whatever information he has. You assume that anything he knows, the enemy knows. All the codes, all the safe houses, everything he knew, the other guy now knows. In clandestine revolutionary and/or terrorist organizations, paranoia isn’t a defect, it is a survival skill.*
Information obtained by torture is only useful if it is actionable, if something can be done with it. If KSM gave away a safe house, that house is almost certainly not going to be used, other than possibly bait for a trap.
What this suggests to me is contrary to our notion of AlQ being a bunch of cunning runts, actually, they were unsophisticated religious fanatics with no clue as to what they were about. To wildly oversimplify, if Lenin were running AlQ, Osama would still be alive.
*Addenduh: which is why in a properly run cadre, nobody knows anymore than he absolutely must know to perform his assigned function. Where do you think the phrase “need to know” comes from?
Some people base their opinions on facts and the opinions of experts. Torture is considered by experts to be unreliable. The guys who decided to use torture in the last administration weren’t expert interrogators, they were outside contractors with no experience.
http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/05/obama-advisor-waterboarding-didnt-lead-to-bin-laden-kill/ According to some insiders , it was not due to waterboarding at all.
When you are tortured, you will say anything to make it stop. How do you tell if it has value? You are not connecting the dots, merely making more and more dots.
But we do desperately want to justify waterboarding, because it diminishes us . So if we can pretend it works, it may not be so bad.
It is.
Really? ALL experts consider enhanced interrogation techniques to be unreliable? Or is it just that the experts you listen to (i.e., the ones who consider enhanced interrogation techniques to be unreliable) consider enhanced interrogation techniques to be unreliable?
And you have no agenda for choosing which experts to listen to, do you? You just somehow became interested in the topic of interrogation, and made a complete and unbiased survey of the subject, and found some opinions from completely unbiased experts, and that’s the conclusion every single one of them came to, right?
No. I looked at the issue when it came to the forefront because Bush decided to flush two centuries of America as the good-guy down the toilet. The experts I listen to, are actually experts. Not some bloated shitbag on FOX that struts about strength or Neocon chicken-hawks who want every American gesture to be made with a fist.
People who actually interrogate people for intelligence community don’t think that torture is reliable. Care to cite actual working interrogators in the intelligence field who do think it’s reliable?
Right. Like I said, you aren’t some guy who became interested in enhanced interrogation techniques and then performed an unbiased survey of expert opinion. You became interested in it only when a President you don’t like started talking about using them.
Meaning that they agree with your position.
Not sure how this part is relevant.
No thanks. You aren’t interested in facts–you know the truth, facts would just get in your way.
No, I because interested when a president started torturing people. If Clinton or Obama started torturing people I’d have cared too. As opposed to you, who can see no wrong as long as an issue can possibly be considered right-wing.
My position is based on what the consensus of the working professionals is. I would oppose torture on ethical grounds even if it did work, as it happens it provides untrustworthy information too. It’s un-American and it doesn’t work. Which I suppose puts it right along side most of your policy preferences. 
I’m *only *interested in facts. That’s why I asked you for some. I will note that instead of providing them you back-peddle and run away.
Why the hell do you bother asking questions if you are just going to toss the answers out the window and make up your own?
So you were alive during the McKinley administration? Wow, you’re old.
You’re in the wrong forum for that, bub.
OK. Please provide a cite to this consensus of working professionals. Thank you.
Again, wrong forum, bub.
You say you base your opinion on some consensus–so let’s see it. Put up or shut up.
Not but minutes ago, you were asked for a cite and refused, based on your contempt for his capacity to process facts. I only mention this because it is entirely possible that you don’t realize the stunning hypocrisy of that sequence.
He says he has a belief based on the consensus of working interrogators. It’s up to him to provide a cite for that consensus (or not and show that he’s full of shit). I haven’t made a single claim that imposes any burden on my to produce a cite.
Here is a list of cites: Top Interrogation Experts Agree: Torture Doesn't Work → Washingtons Blog
Note that these include the Army Field Manual, the FBI, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, the CIA Inspector General, various other military interrogators and FBI and CIA sources.
Now, will you please cite your experts that claim that torture produces reliable and useful intelligence?
And this just in:
Senate Intelligence Chair: Information that Led To Bin Laden’s Killing Did Not Come from Torture
(Center-lefty site, contamination protocols should be observed…)
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/03/feinstein-intel-torture-bin-laden/
There’s mine. Where’s yours?
Did you even read your link?
I didn’t see that as over the line.
How about: Does torture work? | Science | The Guardian
How about: FM 34-52 Chapter 1
Or does the Army not count because it goes against your unexamined gut-instinct?
See above.
Or maybe we have gone through this extensively already on this message board and provided extensive citations.
But hey…while I await your citations for these other experts who think torture works as a good means of gaining valuable information I’ll leave you with the CIA’s take on it. Hopefully you’ll count them as an expert cite:
I’ll look at those cites later when I get a chance. I have no doubt that none of them say anything about a consensus of working interrogators, and the consensus exists in your mind only.
Also, for all of you insisting that I provide a cite that enhanced interrogation techniques are effective, I’ll remind you that I never said that I believe they are effective. Here’s my position (as I stated upthread):
I know it’s hard for some of you to grasp nuances of issues beyond “torture bad!” but please do try. Just because I disagree that “torture bad!” doesn’t mean I believe it’s effective. My only view is that it doesn’t matter what my view is.