Jim ‘Dim’ Hoft Claims ‘Vindication’ for Bush
That is the title of the photo below that was posted Friday to Jim Hoft’s blog, Gateway Pundit:
So Bush is vindicated for bin Laden getting away at Tora Bora, and then turning his attention to Iraq? He’s vindicated because Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (known to the sane as “torture”) someone got the information that led to bin Laden’s whereabouts (even without any confirmation of this claim)?
On Tuesday, Andrew Sullivan dismantled the false GOP spin on torture’s role in getting bin Laden:
Leave aside the horrifying fact that Republicans, seeking to score some ownership of this triumph, would look to torture as their contribution. Why not the beefed up on-the-ground intelligence from 2005 on? That’s Bush’s legacy that Obama built on. Besides, there is no evidence that it played any part whatsoever. From the NYT:
Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.
My italics. So in torturing these two men, interrogators got nothing of substance. In fact, it was only by assuming that these men were lying under torture that the investigation continued. It was subsequently, during normal interrogations that KSM gave us a central clue:
Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them 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.
To repeat: in the one instance we now clearly know about, the CIA is telling us that torture gave them lies. Which they were. Only when traditional interrogation was used did we get the actual names of the couriers.
To quote Hoft at the end of his post, “Amen.”