WASHINGTON:
Water-boarding and other harsh interrogation techniques provided no key
evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a new senate report into the
use of torture by the CIA in the years after the September 11 attacks is
expected to claim.
If confirmed, the finding in the
6,200-page senate report will directly challenge assertion by former
members of the George W. Bush administration that the CIA’s so-called
“enhanced interrogation” techniques were an essential tool in
prosecuting the war on terror.
Congressional aides
familiar with the still-secret report told the Associated Press that a
review of some 6 million classified documents had led them to conclude
there was no benefit derived from treatment that the United Nations and
rights groups say amounted to torture.
The US senate’s
powerful intelligence committee is due to hold a vote on Thursday on
whether to release a 400-page summary of the report, setting in motion a
declassification process that could take several months before
documents are made public.
The findings of the report have
already caused a bitter and public rift between Dianne Feinstein, the
Committee’s democrat chair, and the CIA whom she has openly accused of
trying to frustrate the publication of the report since its findings
were approved in December 2012.
Most fundamental among its
findings is expected to be that the treatment meted out to Al Qa’eda
suspects in sites such as Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, the Guantánamo
Bay detention centre and “black jails” around the world did not
ultimately yield critical intelligence.
The successful
assassination of bin Laden was seized on by former Bush administration
figures and top CIA officials as vindication of the “enhanced
interrogation techniques” they authorised after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks.
That narrative was strengthened in the popular
imagination by Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial film Zero Dark Thirty, a
dramatic reconstruction of how bin Laden’s whereabouts were pieced
together that was accused by civil rights groups of wrongly depicting
torture as effective.
Among the key points of contention
in the report was the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man
accused of masterminding the September 11 attacks who was waterboarded
183 times.
Intelligence officials have cited that Mohammed
had confirmed that he knew an important al-Qaida courier with the nom
de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti who helped lead CIA investigators to the
compound in Abbottabad where bin Laden was killed.
However
the Senate report concludes such information wasn’t critical and was
obtained not when Mohammed was being water-boarded, but under standard
interrogation months later, the unnamed aides told the Associated Press.
The
CIA also has pointed to the value of information provided by senior
al-Qaida operative Abu Faraj al-Libi, who was captured in 2005 and held
at a secret prison run by the agency.
In previous
accounts, U.S. officials have described how al-Libi made up a name for a
trusted courier and denied knowing al-Kuwaiti. Al-Libi was so adamant
and unbelievable in his denial that the CIA took it as confirmation he
and Mohammed were protecting the courier.
The Senate report concludes evidence gathered from al-Libi wasn't significant either, aides said.
Essentially,
they argue, Mohammed, al-Libi and others subjected to harsh treatment
confirmed only what investigators already knew about the courier. And
when they denied the courier's significance or provided misleading
information, investigators would only have considered that significant
if they already presumed the courier's importance.
The
aides did not address information provided by yet another al-Qaida
operative: Hassan Ghul, captured in Iraq in 2004. Intelligence officials
have described Ghul as the true linchpin of the bin Laden investigation
after he identified al-Kuwaiti as a critical courier.
In a
2012 news release, Ms Feinstein, the head of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, and Sen. Carl Levin, both Democrats, acknowledged an
unidentified “third detainee” had provided relevant information on the
courier.
But they said he did so the day before he was
subjected to harsh CIA interrogation. “This information will be detailed
in the Intelligence committee's report,” the senators said at the time.
In
any case, it still took the CIA years to learn al-Kuwaiti's real
identity: Sheikh Abu Ahmed, a Pakistani man born in Kuwait. How the U.S.
learned of Ahmed's name is still unclear.
Without
providing full details, aides said the Senate report illustrates the
importance of the National Security Agency's efforts overseas.
Intelligence
officials have previously described how in the years when the CIA
couldn't find where bin Laden's courier was, NSA eavesdroppers came up
with nothing until 2010 - when Ahmed had a telephone conversation with
someone monitored by U.S. intelligence.
At that point, U.S. intelligence was able to follow Ahmed to bin Laden's hideout.
