Harsh tactics didn't net bin Laden

The Senate investigation which was strictly a one sided partisan report by Democrats who have now released this info in spite of the fact that it puts lives at risk. Yea that one.


Give us a break. Panetta has more credibility than these Senate Dems.

 

Current and former heads of U.S. spy agencies are criticizing a Senate report’s claim that the CIA tortured detainees and misled the public about its "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

In separate statements on Tuesday, multiple current and former intelligence agency officials defended the work of the agency during the George W. Bush administration and said that agents were doing their best while defending the nation.

George Tenet, who was CIA director through much of the Bush administration, said the report is "biased, inaccurate, and destructive" and said it "does damage to U.S. national security, to the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency, and most of all to the truth."

"It is indeed a dark day for congressional oversight," Tenet added.

CIA Director John Brennan said the agency “made mistakes” in the years after 9/11, but he rebutted the Senate Intelligence Committee’s conclusion that officials routinely misled officials in Washington.
“While we made mistakes, the record does not support the study’s inference that the agency systematically and intentionally misled each of these audiences on the effectiveness of the program,” he said.

Brennan accused lawmakers and congressional staffers, who have spent years on the analysis, of painting “an incomplete and selective picture of what occurred" by compiling the report solely from communications records and not conducting interviews....


....A number of former officials with "hundreds of years of combined service” launched a website to push back on the report, which they described as “marred by errors of facts and interpretation and is completely at odds with the reality that the leaders and officers of the Central Intelligence Agency lived through.”

“It represents the single worst example of congressional oversight in our many years of government service,” they said.

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/2...l&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

 

But remember, this document, yes, it is officially– because the Democrats have the majority of the committee– a committee report. But all the Republicans declined to participate in this. The players who are the ones responsible for this program were not, not any of them, interviewed by the committee. This is based entirely on documents acquired by the committee.

…[Intelligence Committee Chair] Dianne Feinstein and others are fond of saying, well, we couldn’t interview those people because they were under Justice Department investigation. That investigation was concluded a couple years ago. [Fox correspondent] Catherine Herridge pointed out to me earlier, they had the last two years when they could have interviewed the players in this.

[Political commentator] Marc Thiessen said to me a few minutes ago, look, what did we just decry when Rolling Stone did it? And that is a report without having ever consulted the people who are basically accused here. They didn’t do that.

http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/09/b...rt-as-one-sided-as-rolling-stone-story-video/

 

This issue is one of the very few with which our left tilted administration can have any possibility of defaming the GOP (apart from the GOP lethargy TO DO ANYTHING).

But they won't find much sympathy among the American general public for "torturing" terrorists who killed almost 3000 people on 9-11, or for the ones beheading our citizens or the Boston bombers, etc, etc.

Feinstein talked about America's practice of the torture of terrorists but failed to mention the gruesome manner in which innocent babes in the womb are liquified.
Isn't that torture?

But what of the report about which she was commenting and is being used by left oriented news agencies as a springboard for said torture defamation :

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way...ected-to-release-long-held-cia-torture-report

HUH? What? Am I just "stupid" (ala Gruber) or how does Feinstein and company turn "Enhanced interrogation of detainees" magically into torture.


HankD

 

The Senate Intelligence Committee has released its majority report on Central Intelligence Agency detention and interrogation in the wake of 9/11. The following response is from former CIA Directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden (a retired Air Force general), and former CIA Deputy Directors John E. McLaughlin, Albert M. Calland (a retired Navy vice admiral) and Stephen R. Kappes :

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Central Intelligence Agency detention and interrogation of terrorists, prepared only by the Democratic majority staff, is a missed opportunity to deliver a serious and balanced study of an important public policy question. The committee has given us instead 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.

Examining how the CIA handled these matters is an important subject of continuing relevance to a nation still at war. In no way would we claim that we did everything perfectly, especially in the emergency and often-chaotic circumstances we confronted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. As in all wars, there were undoubtedly things in our program that should not have happened. When we learned of them, we reported such instances to the CIA inspector general or the Justice Department and sought to take corrective action.

The country and the CIA would have benefited from a more balanced study of these programs and a corresponding set of recommendations. The committee’s report is not that study. It offers not a single recommendation.

Our view on this is shared by the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Republican minority, both of which are releasing rebuttals to the majority’s report. Both critiques are clear-eyed, fact-based assessments that challenge the majority’s contentions in a nonpartisan way.

What is wrong with the committee’s report?

Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, shown in an undated photo from the FBI. ENLARGE
Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, shown in an undated photo from the FBI. ASSOCIATED PRESS
First, its claim that the CIA’s interrogation program was ineffective in producing intelligence that helped us disrupt, capture, or kill terrorists is just not accurate. The program was invaluable in three critical ways:

• It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives, thereby removing them from the battlefield.

• It led to the disruption of terrorist plots and prevented mass casualty attacks, saving American and Allied lives.

• It added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as an organization and therefore informed our approaches on how best to attack, thwart and degrade it....


....The majority on the Senate Intelligence Committee further claims that the takedown of bin Laden was not facilitated by information from the interrogation program. They are wrong. There is no doubt that information provided by the totality of detainees in CIA custody, those who were subjected to interrogation and those who were not, was essential to bringing bin Laden to justice. The CIA never would have focused on the individual who turned out to be bin Laden’s personal courier without the detention and interrogation program.Specifically, information developed in the interrogation program piqued the CIA’s interest in the courier, placing him at the top of the list of leads to bin Laden. A detainee subjected to interrogation provided the most specific information on the courier. Additionally, KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libi—both subjected to interrogation—lied about the courier at a time when both were providing honest answers to a large number of other critical questions. Since other detainees had already linked the courier to KSM and Abu Faraj, their dissembling about him had great significance.

So the bottom line is this: The interrogation program formed an essential part of the foundation from which the CIA and the U.S. military mounted the bin Laden operation.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-interrogations-saved-lives-1418142644

 

I heard your name being tossed around as being spied on by the CIA. :laugh:

YOU may be right, ctb, Obama sweet talked his radical friends into giving them the info on Bin Laden. That makes for a good headline?

 

Somebody please remind me of how the demoncrats are true patriots and we just differ in the methods to accomplish greatness for America!
(That bubble has just been burst!!!!!!!)

75 years ago that may have been the case, but certainly no longer true.

 

Democrats are just making it up. They never interviewed anyone from the CIA.

Partisan report released for purely political reasons. Lies are to be expected.

 

On this issue, Sen. John McCain has stood tall and right from the beginning. He's the only one who knows from personal experience what torture is like. A lot of Christians should be ashamed of themselves for supporting torture from their couches.

 

That all Republicans opposed this is noteworthy. Even moderate Susan Collins-R (Maine) did not participate and she is on the record as opposing these so-called "alternative interrogation techniques", er, torture, even co-sponsored a bill prohibiting waterboarding.

 

What does it matter? This government democrat or republican does pretty much what it wants when it wants no matter what we the people want.