On the Torture Question, a Bunch of Baloney

Wait a minute, Osama Bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot and killed by American warriors? Isn't that against the law.

Meanwhile, over at Attytood, anti-torture zealot Will Bunch is firmly asserting that the sort of rough interrogation tactics that he calls "torture" had nothing to do with gleaning the intelligence that led to the killing of Bin Laden.

Writes Bunch:

It's time to tear down a myth right now before it spreads. Torture had absolutely nothing to do with killing Osama bin Laden. Nothing. Zero. Ziilch. Nada.

And he would know, of course, better than CIA Director Leon Panetta, who says it's an "open question" whether Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (waterboarding, etc.) helped the intelligence community get the information needed to track down Bin Laden.

Time mag reports:

A former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, who was investigated last year by the Justice Department for the destruction of videos showing senior al-Qaeda officials being interrogated, says that the harsh questioning of terrorism suspects produced the information that eventually led to Osama bin Laden’s death.

Jose Rodriguez ran the CIA’s CounterTerrorism Center from 2002 to 2005 during the period when top al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) and Abu Faraj al-Libbi were taken into custody and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” at secret black site prisons overseas. KSM was subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques. Al Libbi was not waterboarded, but other EITs were used on him.

“Information provided by KSM and Abu Faraj al Libbi about Bin Laden’s courier was the lead information that eventually led to the location of [bin Laden’s] compound and the operation that led to his death,” Rodriguez tells TIME in his first public interview. Rodriguez was cleared of charges in the video destruction investigation last year. (Read CIA Director Leon Panetta’s first interview since the bin Laden raid.)

Rodriguez’s assertion drew criticism from the White House. “There is no way that information obtained by [enhanced interrogation techniques] was the decisive intelligence that led us directly to bin Laden,” says National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor. “It took years of collection and analysis from many different sources to develop the case that enabled us to identify this compound, and reach a judgment that bin Laden was likely to be living there.”

So neither the White House nor the CIA is asserting that EITs had "Nothing. Zero. Ziilch (sic). Nada," with the years-long and ultimately successful effort to bring justice to America's most wanted terrorist.

Because Bunch has such a distaste for the idea of inflicting pain on captured terrorists even if it is done to save American lives, he is committed to claiming that it can't work, despite any evidence that it can and sometimes does. This is a bad place for any thinking person, let alone a journalist, to find himself.

Few of Will's blog readers sound convinced of his assertion. And rightly so.