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Bush-Era
Interrogations Provided Key Details on Bin Laden’s Location
By Catherine Herridge
May 03, 2011
Years of intelligence gathering, including details gleaned from
controversial interrogations of Al Qaeda members during the Bush
administration, ultimately led the Navy SEALs who killed Usama bin
Laden to his compound in Pakistan.
The initial threads of intelligence began surfacing in 2003 and came in
the form of information about a trusted bin Laden courier, a senior
U.S. official told Fox News on condition of anonymity. The information
included an alias for the courier. Bin Laden had cut off all
traditional lines of communication with his network by this time
because the Al Qaeda leader knew the U.S. intelligence community was
monitoring him. It was said that he also didn’t even trust his most
loyal men to know his whereabouts and instead communicated only through
couriers.
But it was four years later, in 2007, that terror suspects at the
Guantanamo Bay military prison started giving up information that led
to the identification of the key courier.
Around this time, the use of enhanced interrogation tactics, including
waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning, were being denounced as
torture by critics of the Bush administration. President George W. Bush
and Vice President Dick Cheney came under intense pressure for
supporting rough treatment of prisoners. Critics claimed that any
information given under duress simply couldn’t be trusted.
It is an argument that Bush and Cheney strongly rejected then, and now.
“I would assume that the enhanced interrogation program that we put in
place produced some of the results that led to bin Laden’s ultimate
capture,” Cheney told Fox News on Monday, a hint of vindication in his
voice.
But Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said Tuesday that to the best of
her knowledge enhanced interrogation techniques did not yield the
information that led to bin Laden.
The White House on Tuesday sought to downplay the role that Bush-era
interrogations played in gathering the information that led to bin
Laden’s death.
“Some of it came from individuals who were in custody. Some of it came
from human sources,” counterterrorism adviser John Brennan told Fox
News. “But there was no single bit of information that was
instrumental.”
Brennan acknowledged that “those in detention” provided key
information, but stressed that it was obtained in a variety of
different ways.
“Sometimes they gave us information willingly,” Brennan said, adding
that sometimes they gave misinformation and sometimes they
inadvertently spilled clues that unlocked other intelligence.
“This was a painstaking ... body of work that was done that was over
the course of many, many years,” he said.
Former Bush administration officials, as well as Republican lawmakers,
have given President Obama and his national security team great credit
for the daring operation Sunday that ended with bin Laden being shot to
death by a CIA-led Navy SEALs team. But they also point to indications
that the controversial interrogation program and information gleaned
from detainees at Guantanamo Bay and at secret overseas prisons may
have played a key role, in claiming Bush-era policies helped set the
stage for Sunday’s success.
“This really does stretch over two presidencies,” former Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News on Tuesday. “There’s a long train
here, and it leads back, I think, to good counterterrorism policies
that were put in place in 2001.”
Information was given up by prisoners, including 9/11 architect Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed. U.S. officials described the courier as a talented
protege and trusted associate of both Mohammed and Al Qaeda’s No. 3
leader at the time, Abu Faraj al Libi. Both men were held at Guantanamo
Bay.
U.S. officials were told the courier’s name was known only to bin
Laden’s innermost circle.
By 2009, the U.S. intelligence community had a rough idea of where the
courier operated: a region north of Islamabad, Pakistan. It was another
year before this compound was identified in August 2010 as a likely
home for a senior Al Qaeda member.
The compound was eight times the size of other homes in the affluent
neighborhood, and the impressive 18-foot-high walls with barbed wire
drew scrutiny from intelligence analysts.
By early this year, information from multiple intelligence sources,
including the now-shuttered harsh interrogation program, as well as CIA
operatives and Special Operations Forces on the ground in Afghanistan
and Pakistan, were building a clearer case that the compound might
house bin Laden. Officials found out that there were three families
living there. In addition, a significantly older man, who was shown
deference by the group, was not required to work on the compound.
Critics of the Bush-era interrogation programs have suggested that the
harsh interrogations were not essential to tracking bin Laden and that
the information could have been obtained by more humane means. But for
Cheney and other Bush administration alumni, Sunday’s raid stands as
proof their system worked.
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