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ORIGINAL: juliaoceania

Real reputable site there...

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Not disputing the facts, just attempting to impugn the source?

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ORIGINAL: mnottertail

Yup, pretty fanciful conjecture.

waterboarding results in a nom de guerre.  from that seminal and all telling utterance of 'klem kadiddlehopper'  we have a long winded, assumptive, non-inductive, non-causally demonstrated chain of events.

I can make you confess to the burning of the reichstag, Firm, and it won't take anything like 183 waterboardings, and you will have me actually believing that you did it inside of a week (with weekends off).

Deep and painful stretch. this.

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ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
Interesting article on the issue:

Break In Hunt for Bin Ladin May Have Been Provided By Not Only Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, But by Enhanced Interrogation Techniques Performed On An Al Qaeda Operative Captured in Iraq

Complex, with a lot of links to other sources, but worth the read, I think.

Firm

“The United States Department of Defense did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone. It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.”

Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.

That regimen of harsh interrogation was used on KSM after another detainee, Abu Zubaydeh, was subjected to the same techniques. When he broke, he said that he and other members of al Qaeda were obligated to resist only until they could no longer do so, at which point it became permissible for them to yield. "Do this for all the brothers," he advised his interrogators.

Abu Zubaydeh was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of 9/11. Bin al Shibh disclosed information that, when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydeh, helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the United States.

Another of those gathered up later in this harvest, Abu Faraj al-Libi, also was subjected to certain of these harsh techniques and disclosed further details about bin Laden's couriers that helped in last weekend's achievement.

The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. Regrettably, that same administration gave them a name—"enhanced interrogation techniques"—so absurdly antiseptic as to imply that it must conceal something unlawful.

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ORIGINAL: Sanity
To listen to the Obama faithful, Obama did it himself

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ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.