FOX News, right wing operatives and grandstanding politicians like Rep. Peter King have been whipping up the idea that torture was used to get the vital bit of Intel that eventually helped lead the US to Bin Laden.
King; We obtained that information through waterboarding. So for those who say that waterboarding doesn’t work, who say it should be stopped and never used again, we got vital information, which directly led us to Bin Laden.”
O'Reilly: Wow!
FOX News featured Rep. Peter King all day yesterday in their coverage along with every ex-Bushie from Andrew Card to Dick Cheney as I waded through hours of their programming and excluded the entire Democratic Party from their coverage except for some video excerpts of Obama and Hillary and a brief appearance by Blue Dog Democrat Dan Boren, who votes 84% of the time with the Republican party on Fox and Friends.
John Brennan disputed King's account, but some of what he said in his presser wasn't very accurate, but Keith Olbermann uncovers a source that right wingers will have a tough time denouncing. Donald Rumsfeld, the man behind Abu Ghraib.
Rumsfeld Disproves Conservatives’ Tortured Argument
The GOP spin machine, caught with its Abu Ghraib pants down, has come up with only two rickety memes with which to pull itself out of the deep end of the political pool. The first was the simplest: “Obama merely finished what Bush began.”
But the second was a little more robust: The Peter King (R-Stupidity) claim mirrored by a tweeter who asked me: “how does it feel knowing Bin Laden courier was discovered under Bush admin & info was obtained in Gitmo?”
--
Wait, it gets worse. Guess who’s out tonight denying that waterboarding, or even “harsh treatment” led to the info that led to Bin Laden?
“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.”
That was said by Don Rumsfeld.
I’ll stop writing now so you can spend a few minutes laughing through your mouth, nose, ears, feet, and eyeballs.
If any ex-Bushie wanted torture to work it would be Donald Rumsfeld, who led the way for harsher treatment of detainees under his watch in 2002:
In an extraordinary disclosure of classified material, the Bush administration released 258 pages of internal documents Tuesday that portray harsh interrogation techniques — including stripping terror suspects and threatening them with dogs — as a necessary response to threats from al-Qaeda terrorists
--
The alert set in motion a review that culminated with a Nov. 27, 2002, "action memo" in which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved interrogation techniques that included "removal of clothing" and "inducing stress by use of detainee's fears (e.g. dogs)." Rumsfeld also approved placing detainees in "stress positions," such as standing for up to 4 hours, though he apparently found this approach unimpressive. Rumsfeld, who works at a stand-up desk, scrawled on the memo, "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours? D.R." (Related link: View memo) Eventually, after military officers raised moral and legal concerns about the techniques and the Pentagon conducted an internal review, Rumsfeld issued revised rules for Guantanamo in April 2003 that omitted the stripping and use of dogs.
Andrew Sullivan has a great round up about the lying Torture meme being pushed by the GOP and FOX: The Big Lie: Torture Got Bin Laden
Think Progress: Senate Intelligence Chair: Information That Led To Bin Laden’s Killing Did Not Come From Torture
TNR disputes the case for torture also.
