You certainly won't hear Eric Holder or Barack Obama ever make this admission. In fact, I'm stunned that the leftist-leaning Washington Post even allowed this to go to print.
Khalid Shieik Mohammed, who refers to himself as the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, began to reveal a great deal of valuable information after CIA interrogators began using the technique known as "waterboarding" on him. Before that, he managed to resist interrogation quite effectively.
From Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate:
| "KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete," according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA's then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department. The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general's report and other documents released this week indicate. Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again. |
But here is what the interrogations yielded:
| Mohammed provided $1,000 to Ramzi Yousef, a nephew, to help him carry out the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. In 1994, he worked in the Philippines with Yousef, now serving a life sentence at the federal "supermax" prison in Colorado, on a failed plot to down 12 U.S. commercial aircraft over the Pacific. Mohammed told interrogators it was in the Philippines that he first considered using planes as missiles to strike the United States. He took the idea to Osama bin Laden, who "at first demurred but changed his mind in late 1999," according to the summary. Mohammed described plans to strike targets in Saudi Arabia, East Asia and the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, including using a network of Pakistanis "to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and the Brooklyn bridge in New York." Cross-referencing material from different detainees, and leveraging information from one to extract more detail from another, the CIA and FBI went on to round up operatives both in the United States and abroad. "Detainees in mid-2003 helped us build a list of 70 individuals -- many of who we had never heard of before -- that al-Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations," according to the CIA summary. Mohammed told interrogators that after the Sept. 11 attacks, his "overriding priority" was to strike the United States, but that he "realized that a follow-on attack would be difficult because of security measures." Most of the plots, as a result, were "opportunistic and limited," according to the summary. |
How many American lives were saved because of that information? How many attacks were thwarted because of the techniques used?
The average lib Democrat would rather see thousands of Americans killed than to see one terrorist suffer the least little bit. It would be nice if the Dems actually rooted for our side for once.
EITs work and we should continue using them. Holder and Obama should get out of the way and let the people charged with defending America do their jobs.
You can access the complete article on-line here:
How A Detainee Became An Asset
Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate
Washington Post
August 29, 2009
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