In support of Senator John McCain’s contention on the subject, CIA director Leon Panetta wrote a letter to the Republican lawmaker that undercuts claims by former Bush administration officials that torture was instrumental in tracking down Osama bin Laden.

 

Obtained by Greg Sargent at The Washington Post, the Panetta letter reads:

 

“Nearly 10 years of intensive intelligence work led the CIA to conclude that Bin Ladin was likely hiding at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. There was no one ‘essential and indispensible’ key piece of information that led us to this conclusion. Rather, the intelligence picture was developed via painstaking collection and analysis. Multiple streams of intelligence—including from detainees, but also from multiple other sources—led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was at this compound. Some of the detainees who provided useful information about the facilitator/courier’s role had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Whether those techniques were the ‘only timely and effective way’ to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively. What is definitive is that that information was only a part of multiple streams of intelligence that led us to Bin Ladin.”

 

McCain recently published an Op-ed in The Washington Post questioning the assertions of Bush officials that torture was a key in getting bin Laden. The senator cited Panetta as a source for his information, but did not release the letter.

 

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey made the case for conservatives about torture in his own opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal. In it Mukasey argued the trail to bin Laden “began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 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.”

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Private Letter from CIA Chief Undercuts Claim Torture Was Key to Killing Bin Laden (by Greg Sargent, Washington Post)

Bin Laden Raid Revives Debate on Value of Torture (by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage, New York Times)

6 Things We Thought We Knew about the Killing of Osama bin Laden That Turned out to be Wrong (by David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)