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"The committee has given us ... a one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation - essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America after the 9/11 attacks," they said. The report concluded the CIA failed to disrupt any subsequent plots despite torturing captives during the presidency of George W. Bush. But the former CIA officials said the United States never would have tracked down and killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011 without information acquired in the interrogation program. Their methods also led to the capture of ranking al Qaeda operatives, provided valuable information about the organization and saved thousands of lives by disrupting al Qaeda plots, including one for an attack on the U.S. West Coast that could have been similar to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Let's just take that self serving assertion. We by all accounts ceased 'enhanced interrogation' years ago, years before we killed OBL. What intelligence gathered during a waterboarding session led the spooks to his hideout in Pakistan many years after those interrogation sessions occurred and years before he was at that location?
By some accounts, the key information about a courier was obtained through normal methods. And even if the torture sessions produced some evidence that was eventually, 8 years later, useful, it's also clear that we also relied on vast amounts of information that was gathered through conventional means, and we'll never know whether or not that information from torture, or better information, could have been obtained through conventional means. Professional interrogators have repeatedly testified that torture is an inferior technique to gather actionable intelligence - not inferior morally or ethically but on a practical level. That it might produce SOME evidence isn't actually any proof that, even if we accept self serving claims by the torturers, that torture is the better method.