Top Politic News

WASHINGTON – The government's catch for Osama containerful Laden has mitt the land asking whether the tactics utilised to interrogate suspected terrorists were flourishing and lawful. With his death, both sides of the speaking hit regrouped along familiar lines, claiming they were correct all along.

But America's large counterterrorism success does not represent a conclusion for either camp. Rather, it paints a clearer represent of the CIA's interrogatory and confinement program, disclosing where it was flourishing and where its successes hit been overstated.

At its core, the catch for containerful Laden evolved into a catch for his couriers, the whatever men he trusted to pass his individualized messages to his field commanders. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, detainees in the CIA's info situation meshwork told interrogators most digit of al-Qaida's most essential couriers, someone famous exclusive as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. He was a protege of al-Qaida's No. 3, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

In 2003, the CIA captured Mohammed, the group's operational leader. Muhammad was interrogated using what the agency titled "enhanced interrogatory techniques" much as sleep disadvantage and the simulated drowning technique famous as waterboarding. Months after existence waterboarded, Muhammad recognized lettered al-Kuwaiti, instance officials say.

"So for those who feature that waterboarding doesn't work, to feature that it should be stopped and never utilised again: We got alive information, which direct led us to containerful Laden," the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said last week.

But underway and instance officials direct participating in the interrogatory aggregation feature that's not the case.

Mohammed recognized lettered al-Kuwaiti after existence waterboarded, but he also denied he was an al-Qaida amount or of some importance. It was a lie, much same the stories Muhammad said he made up most where containerful Laden was hiding. Even after the CIA deemed him "compliant," Muhammad never gave up al-Kuwaiti's real study or his location, or recognized al-Kuwaiti's grandness in the terrorist network.

But the confinement aggregation did endeavor a pivotal persona in the search for containerful Laden.

In 2004, crowning al-Qaida operative Hassan Ghul was captured in Iraq. In a info CIA prison, Ghul addicted to the CIA that al-Kuwaiti was an essential courier. In particular, Ghul said, the traveller was near to Faraj al-Libi, who had replaced Muhammad as al-Qaida's operational commander.

The CIA had less success when it captured al-Libi.

Al-Libi was not waterboarded. But he did intend the full arrange of enhanced interrogation, including pure sleep deprivation, instance officials recalled. Despite those efforts, al-Libi adamantly denied lettered al-Kuwaiti. He recognized gathering with an essential courier, but he provided a fake name.

Both he and Muhammad withheld or fictitious information, modify after the agency's toughest interrogations. That gave credence to what whatever longtime interrogators hit maintained, that increasingly disagreeable asking produces aggregation but not needs sure information.

Given what they knew from another detainees, CIA interrogators suspected that al-Libi and Muhammad were misrepresentaation most al-Kuwaiti and that it must be essential if they were so sworn to withholding this information. So they reasoned that, if they could encounter al-Kuwaiti, they might encounter containerful Laden. Years later, thanks to help from another informants and an intercepted phone call involving al-Kuwaiti last year, the CIA was evidenced right. Asiatic inadvertently led the agency to containerful Laden's sill in Pakistan.

"They utilised these enhanced interrogatory techniques against whatever of these detainees," CIA Director metropolis Panetta said this instance week. "But I'm also saying that, you know, the speaking most whether we would hit gotten the same aggregation finished another approaches, I conceive is ever feat to be an unstoppered question."

The Obama administration has tagged waterboarding torture. While Attorney General Eric Holder has said he module not act some officers who followed the rules ordered out by CIA, White House and Justice Department lawyers, he has ordained a prosecutor to review cases in which detainees died.

CIA officers participating in finding containerful Laden said they are frustrated that the entire confinement and interrogatory aggregation and the killing of containerful Laden hit been reduced to a speaking over waterboarding.

"People can speaking the value of some single piece of aggregation that may or may not hit become from a aggregation same that," said Rob Dannenberg, the instance honcho of dealings at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, who retired in 2007. "But in the aggregate and over the course of time, you are feat to unravel the best surreptitious organizations in the concern with cards and persistence."

Obama winking the CIA's situation grouping soon after attractive office. Human rights advocates cheered the modify of a grouping in which detainees were held indefinitely, without admittance to lawyers or the International Committee of the Red Cross, as is ordinarily required.

Critics accused the chair of abandoning the strategy that had worked, of capturing terrorists and asking them. Instead, the U.S. has increased airstrikes from pilotless Predator drones, which hit killed terrorists in the tribal regions along the abut of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We weren't capturing people anymore, they were meet success up departed in the tribal areas," said Bob Grenier, who ran the Counterterrorism Center from 2004 to 2006.

When that happens, Grenier said, the CIA doesn't intend to inspect radiophone phones or documents or whatever added is in the shack during the capture.

"They take their secrets with them," Grenier said.

Obama was unable to fit his pledge to near the Guantanamo Bay expeditionary prison, where suspected terrorists are held. He had hoped to move whatever onto U.S. soil for trial, but semipolitical contestant stalled that effort. Now, if the CIA captures a major terrorist abroad, it's unclear what the U.S. would do with him.

Though the CIA prisons are closed, Afghanistan is digit possibility. There, the U.S. expeditionary maintains a meshwork of info jails where detainees are existence held and interrogated for weeks, including digit separate by the selected primary dealings forces at Bagram Air Base in Kabul.

Source