Torture May Have Slowed Hunt For Bin Laden, Not Hastened It

Torture apologists are reaching precisely the wrong conclusion from the back-story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, say experienced interrogators and intelligence professionals.

Defenders of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago.

But that sequence of events -- even if true -- doesn’t demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly.

"I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden," said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.

It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier -- information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, "they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us," Alexander told The Huffington Post.

"We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information," he said.

In a 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College, trained interrogators found that traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches are extremely effective with even the most hardened detainees, whereas coercion consistently builds resistance and resentment.

"Had we handled some of these sources from the beginning, I would like to think that there’s a good chance that we would have gotten this information or other information," said Steven Kleinman, a longtime military intelligence officer who has extensively researched, practiced and taught interrogation techniques.

"By making a detainee less likely to provide information, and making the information he does provide harder to evaluate, they hindered what we needed to accomplish," said Glenn L. Carle, a retired CIA officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002.

But the discovery and killing of bin Laden was enough for defenders of the Bush administration to declare that their policies had been vindicated.

Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president, quickly issued a statement declaring that she was "grateful to the men and women of America’s intelligence services who, through their interrogation of high-value detainees, developed the information that apparently led us to bin Laden."

John Yoo, the lead author of the "Torture Memos," wrote in the Wall Street Journal that bin Laden's death "vindicates the Bush administration, whose intelligence architecture marked the path to bin Laden's door."

Former Bush secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that "the information that came from those individuals was critically important."

The Obama White House pushed back against that conclusion this week.

"The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003," Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council, told The New York Times.

 1  2  3  Next  Last »

Comments

[dbrett480]

12:33 AM on 05/11/2011

This article is pure speculation. We are never going to know for certain where the information came from that revealed bin Laden's location.

[Akin]

07:58 PM on 05/10/2011

If KSM was tortured, Osama Bin Laden was assassinated.

[blahblahblahreally]

06:34 AM on 05/10/2011

The last thing that you want to do to someone with oppositional defiance disorder is torture them, they will make the biggest point out of not telling you a thing. Not everybody has this disorder. In Afganistan , we're fighting people who grew up in a war zone. Maybe they have been conditioned by that to be more prone to barbarism towards us. And the suicide bombers towards themselves and others. (I don't know how the Taliban/Al Qaeda get people to blow themselves up but whatever they are telling them must be pretty good. It's got to be more than you are going to be up to your eyeballs in T&A in the great beyond) My question is how barbaric would you become to protect your loved ones and home? If you were getting mugged would you kick some butt or be a good victim?

[threewarveteran]

05:28 PM on 05/09/2011

We blow them all to kingdom come like we always have. We spend more on defense that russia, china, england, japan, saudia arabia, france and iran combined. We are the only nation to have ever destroyed a country with nuclear weapons. We have the largest fighting force and means to deliver it on the planet. We have satellites that can detect two lady bugs mating from 300 miles up in space. We have technology that every other country has to buy from us to get. We don't take some poor SOB and pull his fingers out to get some information that is not true to win. We can win every war we fight, no country can occupy someone elses country after that. Would you continue to fight the chinese if they invaded our country and "won the war'? As long as we do not pretend to be conquerors we always win.
remember this, Yea though I walk through valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil
for I am the meanest moth####er in the valley.

[Theophrastus]

03:24 PM on 05/09/2011

Imagine that a serial killer has kidnapped one of your little children. The man has been captured and your child was not with him. He informs you that your child is still alive, but buried six feet underground in a special coffin surrounded by a concrete bunker. There is only enough air left for the child to live another eight hours. When you beg him to tell you where your child is, he goes off into a sadistic monologue about how he'll never talk and that he always wanted to watch a parent's face as they sat there, helpless, knowing that their child is dying. He will not bargain, nor negotiate but fully intends, through inaction, to follow through with the murder and watch you go insane with grief. The police officers, at risk of incarceration to themselves have heard enough, and ask you to leave the room. As you sit outside shaking and weeping, you see one of them bring in an acetylene torch. You hear the monster screaming in agony as they demand to know where the child is. Do you stop them?

[liberal123]

04:59 PM on 05/09/2011

Dramatic, but not much applicability to intelligence gathering from al-Qaeda suspects - - As the article notes, traditional rapport-based interview approaches work better than torture.

[DocSkull]

06:55 PM on 05/09/2011

"Imagine that..."

If he's a sadistic serial murderer he's just going to enjoy sending you on wild goose chases. The trained and experienced professionals say they have a better way.

[Theophrastus]

11:42 AM on 05/11/2011

Not if you take him where he tells you to go and you cut off a finger with a pruning shears each time he lies to you.

[artemrss]

02:19 PM on 05/09/2011

Our country executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American POWs. We executed them for the same crime we used during the Bush Administration. We executed them over what are now debating now.

I think the remarks made by those in the field are so clear. Waterboarding is torture, and torture makes one "confess," to anything. Lawful interrogation gets information.

We will never know for sure, but the fact is the Bush Administration's attention span drifted pretty quickly after 9/11 (some say even before his election) to invade Iraq. The money, troops, intelligence, and focus were on Sadam Hussein. The special agency known as Alec Station a part of the CIA was disbanded sometime in 2005/2006. There were reasons given at the time that stated they were still hunting bin laden down, but in a "different" way.

However you look at it, President Bush himself stated on 3/13/2002, just months after 9/11, he was not "too concerned about bin laden," etc., Of course, that doesn't mean bin laden was not being sought. What it does mean to me, is that the hardline focus was not a priority, but Sadam was. An expensive invasion for naught.

Al Queda was training in Afghanistan along the Pakistani border. Bin Laden was there at Tora Bora. Bush left jangled pieces behind and Obama put them together. President Obama did the job. He took what jigsaw pieces that were strewn all over the place and made sense of them.

[bloodonthemotorway]

03:08 PM on 05/09/2011

We also locked up all the Japanese into camps during WWII. And then gave the top Japanese and German scientists asylum. It's the US, nothing new.

[marco01]

02:43 PM on 07/04/2011

And 4 million people used to be slaves in this country, I suppose the mere fact that these things happened in the US makes them right.

[Akin]

07:21 PM on 05/09/2011

Prove your opening contention.

No actual transcripts back up that wild uberLeft assertion anywhere online...

[DocSkull]

07:46 PM on 05/09/2011

"No actual transcript­s back up that wild uberLeft assertion anywhere online... "

Are you calling John McCain a liar? and "uberLeft?" (whatever that means)

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/29/politics/main3554687.shtml

[artemrss]

11:11 PM on 05/09/2011

Akin, apparently you are not looking in the right place. Look up Tokyo Trials/International Miitary Tribunal for the Far East.

At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as "water cure," "water torture" and "waterboarding," according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning.

Check out:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/18/john-mccain/history-supports-mccains-stance-on-waterboarding/

[Akin]

01:27 PM on 05/09/2011

This whole debate hinges around an uberLeft misdefinition of torture.

That is being done to demonize opponents & shut down real analysis & debate.

I call torture torture.

Like ripping out toenails, or burning victims with cigarette butts, or cutting off genitals.

A practice like waterboarding, which is as harmful (or even less harmful) as a Taser gun, water cannon, pepper spray, tear gas, handcuff restraint, police baton strike or an attack by a controlled police dog does not qualify as torture. Otherwise, virtually all police tactics would have to be junked as well all around the world.

Is this what a Left-leaning utopia would look like?

[liberal123]

02:33 PM on 05/09/2011

Following WWII, the Japanese who had waterboarded US prisoners were prosecuted as war criminals. The US rightfully considered it torture. The definition of torture under the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment includes any act by which "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession....".

Waterboarding, shackling in stress (painful) postions, and extreme sleep deprivation are torture techniques. Also, the countries where the US "renditions" prisoners beat them and use electric shock torture.

Your argument about police practices for subduing suspects is a straw man argument, because the techniques you list are for subduing violent suspects, while the torture techniques used by the US are for inflicting pain for the purpose of extracting information.

[Akin]

06:07 AM on 05/10/2011

Your last point is (perhaps deliberately?) false:
"For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, PUNISHING him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, OR intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or FOR ANY REASON based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions."

See how liberals cherry-pick international law in debates?

I'll respond to your other point separately.

[Akin]

06:18 AM on 05/10/2011

About waterboarding being the basis of the Tokyo trials: all I can say is that after some careful digging, I finally found some transcripts.

They make interesting reading. The emphasis is on aggressive war, not waterboarding. In fact, not one of the verdicts is for waterboarding as a stand-alone offense, even where the guilt was solely around the issue of inhumane treatment. The judgements to a man were about causing actual bodily harm and death on a massive scale. I don't mean to spoil your dinner, but examples were of cutting off women's breasts & wombs, abandoning sick POWs without medication and water, executing inactive combatants & civilians, and such like. To suggest that these trials were about waterboarding is to completely misread the thrust of those proceedings. They were in fact about causing indiscriminate death in the theatre of agressive war. And very little justification is given for ranking waterboarding with the clearly physically destructive torture forms enumerated in the document. That was probably the victors unilaterally setting out to throw the kitchen sink at the losers simply because they could do so.
Hence my point that to be consistent, in order to berate anyone over waterboarding using these trials as justification, Obama must be much more heavily sanctioned and criticised for using targeted assassination, including of unarmed and non-combative suspects. Anything else is false moralizing.

[onionboy]

03:00 PM on 05/09/2011

So, by your logic, you would be OK if the police water boarded you for information if you were a suspect or had suspected knowledge or involvement in a crime?

[Akin]

07:26 PM on 05/09/2011

If I stonewalled, yes, as much as I am OK being forcibly detained, or chased with police dogs if I evaded arrest, or ordered to lie face down at the end of a car chase, or teargassed in a demonstration, or tazered or even shot if I aimed a lethal weapon at a police officer or disobeyed lawful police instructions - all of which King Obama's forces practice in some corner of the US or world today.

Is he a war criminal too?

[Coleen Rowley]

12:12 PM on 05/09/2011

Froomkin's is a masterful job of assembling what interrogation experts have learned about the lack of actual effectiveness of torture tactics. It's absolutely critical to debunk the torture proponents' false rationale of torture's effectiveness at this stage since the American public (including the media) has largely swallowed the Jack Bauer "24" notion that adherence to ethical and legal principles are in tension and constitute a trade-off with pragmatic effectiveness.

"Ends justify the means" utilitarian arguments have come to dominate US decision-making in the "war on terror" although few people actually understand the dynamics of utilitarian ethics. What most do not appreciate is that there are two very different forms of utilitarianism. One form ("rule utilitarianism") is valid as it hinges on what works or is effective "as a rule". But the other form, "act utilitarianism", is completely bogus as it hinges on allowing the proponent to concoct a hypothetical "end" or outcome to justify the use of unlawful, unethical means, even without any evidence or proof of the method's effectiveness. By definition effectiveness cannot be demonstrated if the goal is only achieved 1 out of 100 times as that's equivalent to saying that it's better for 99 ticking time bombs to explode if just one is prevented. The truth is finally coming out that the positing of any happy end, goal or hoped-for outcome was never more than clever artifice that enabled torture proponents to rationalize backwards over a series of unproven, false premises.

[Lovenox]

01:09 PM on 05/09/2011

Then what is your opinion on going into a country without consent and killing an elderly, unarmed man in front of his wife? So it is OK to kill them in a manner not consented by law but you cannot pour water on his face?

[onionboy]

03:03 PM on 05/09/2011

His post was about balancing effectiveness into the equation. Not to answer for him, but I would say that the killing of OBL was completely effective.

[Aimleft]

03:32 PM on 05/09/2011

Only a true w i n g n u t would pose such a question. It is sad that, simply because bin ladin was killed via the Obama administration, you seek to diminish that feat and make up (or actually, mimic what you've heard from others) such a picky, prissy little premise, as if you were actually sorry for poor, poor bin ladin.

[weneedaLEADER]

01:30 PM on 05/09/2011

The One Percent Doctrine at it's finest. Excellent analysis, thank you.

[marleysghost]

11:48 AM on 05/09/2011

The US traditionally did not use torture until the Bush administration revived it precisely because it is ineffective - besides being barbaric. Psychological non-coercive techniques work because with enough patience a person can be persuaded that it is in his best interests to cooperate and live and actually be protected from retaliation for disclosing information. But we were faced with an administration with no finesse, and no sense of diplomacy, so intent were they on using a big hammer on every problem they faced, that they were blind to the benefits diplomatic and enlightened sel-interest methods can reveal. And the added benefit of gaining cooperation instead of forced disclosed "confessions" under torture is that you have many more options for gaining trust and more reliable data.

[Akin]

01:05 PM on 05/09/2011

Your political bias blinds you to reality to the point that you actually misrepresent history.

"But we were faced with an administra­tion with no finesse, and no sense of diplomacy, so intent were they on using a big hammer on every problem they faced, that they were blind to the benefits diplomatic and enlightene­d sel-intere­st methods can reveal."

Three examples to prove you utterly wrong
1. North Korea - 6 party talks were pursued throughout by the Bush Admin; never invaded.
2. Iran - despite all the speeches, Bush never invaded or "hammer"-ed Iran, instead supporting EU diplomacy.
3. Africa - Bush's policy rehabilitated Libya (which Obama is now militarily attacking:D) whilst improving prospects & economic performance of many sub-Saharan countries.

Sweeping generalizations are a small step from deliberate deceit.

Oh, and waterboarding is not torture.

[Lovenox]

01:16 PM on 05/09/2011

Akin, didn't Libya also abandon its nuclear aspirations as well? The fact also remains that President Obama has broken many promises that he made to the country and especially to his base. Patriot Act? POTUS signed the extention. Rendering? Still on going unabated under President Obama. GITMO? Open for business. War? Afghanistan surge and a new front opened up in Libya. Civilian trail for terrorists? Back to military tribunal. And the hits keep on coming. Publically, people who champion the President have tried to place a good spin on his decisions, privately there is a lot of voter remorse, angst and hand wrinin going on.

[weneedaLEADER]

01:36 PM on 05/09/2011

On point #1: Where does North Korea stand at this moment? Do you feel 43's policy in North Korea was a success?

#2: Even 43 was not insane enough to invade Iran

#3: "REHABILITATED Libya??? You cannot be serious.

Marley made some great points that you responded to with talking points, nothing more.

[Lovenox]

01:06 PM on 05/09/2011

Wrong. Clinton started the rendition program and it continues under President Obama unabated.

[Akin]

02:10 PM on 05/09/2011

Oh no, you've let the cat out of the bag!

Come on, let's say Bill Clinton was a Republican :D

[Libleet]

11:03 AM on 05/09/2011

Third Geneva Convention Article 3...Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely...To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) VIOLENCE TO LIFE and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, CRUEL TREATMENT AND TORTURE;
(c) OUTRAGES UPON PERSONAL DIGNITY, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording ALL THE JUDICIAL GUARANTEES which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

Article 13...prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against ACTS OF VIOLENCE AND INTIMIDATION and against insults and public curiosity.

Article 17...No physical or mental torture, NOR ANY OTHER FORM OF COERSION, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

Article 22...Prisoners of war may be interned only in premises located on land and affording every guarantee of hygiene and healthfulness. Except in particular cases which are justified by the interest of the prisoners themselves, they SHALL NOT BE INTERNED IN PENETENTIARIES.

[Akin]

01:08 PM on 05/09/2011

According to article 17, if waterboarding is out, so then is all form of psychologically manipulative interviewing, which the uberLeft likes to posit as the alternative that "works"...

Game over, let them take over the world!

[onionboy]

03:08 PM on 05/09/2011

That's a false statement. Only techniques resulting in extreme or ongoing psychological damage, not all manipulative interviewing.

Is lying a hobby or a profession for you?

[p c r]

12:32 AM on 05/10/2011

Are you really this obtuse or are you just posting for cash?

[ScapeGoat]

03:47 PM on 05/11/2011

F&F

Regressives are just fact less people who manipulate to make a point that is totally wrong.

[blahblahblahreally]

09:37 AM on 05/09/2011

About half of what I try to convey is being censored.............Anyone else? It's interesting because none of them are overtly obscene.

[JHberger]

08:55 AM on 05/09/2011

The Global War on Terror is a war of intelligence, where the enemy walks among us (and the Pakistanis). Without accurate intelligence, Obama would have had no where to send the SEALS. Prior to Bush, the intelligence community was a demoralized mess working under an impossible rule set. The Obama administration policies favor killing terrorists in the field rather than capture them and interrogate them. As to effectiveness, most of the above article is conjecture about "what would have happened" without enhanced interrogation.

[Drumbum2112]

09:07 AM on 05/09/2011

First of all you made that up about favoring killing verses capture. Second Bush Cancelled the CIA program hunting for ABL in Afgahnistan. President Obama made it the CIA.s number one priority when he took office and one year later they had discovered his location,

The "conjecture" of the experts is valuable, the conjecture of the supporters of torture such as Liz Chenny are even less valid than any person on the street.

[jimfurl179]

09:51 AM on 05/09/2011

I'm glad bin Laden's dead. But show me any evidence that the White House has released on this matter that indicates OBL was given a chance to surrender for capture. So it was not made up by JHberger. Secondly the CIA program you reference was the bin Laden Station set up by the Clinton Administration AFTER the first WTC attack, AFTER the USS Cole attack, and AFTER US Embassy bombings in Africa. And AFTER this OBL station was set up armed US drones found bin Laden in an open field and Clinton refused to kill him then--for whatever reason. But that allowed bin Laden to live and carry out the attacks on 9/11 which lead to the loss of about 3000 American lives. Is that the CIA program you are referring to?

[StateOfFear]

09:34 AM on 05/09/2011

Read the study from the National Defense Intelligence College, Sec 2 xviii. It states that intellegence gathering without violence gets more information and more accurate information under war conditions. This study shows that violence is not as effective as cooperative methods.

The study is not conjecture. It shows that we don't know valuable information because torture was used. It is conjecture than to say that violence prduced reliable information and as much as we could get.

[Akin]

01:11 PM on 05/09/2011

Does that violence therefore include the ultimate act of violence, KILLING the suspect?

Any comment on how effective drones are in interrogating suspects or gathering useful intelligence?

[William J Unverferth Sr]

08:41 AM on 05/09/2011

Anyone can play what if and come to whatever conclusion they want. If we had used a Magic 8 Ball we could have gotten OBL 10 years before 9/11. See how easy that was... It doesn't matter of you are pro or anti enhanced interrogation this type of post facto analysis is rather meaningless.

[Suresp77]

12:25 PM on 05/09/2011

No, it is not meaningless: we learn more from our failures than our successes. We had a success, so in an effort to sift through and find what works, it is even more important to figure out what did not work. Its not about assigning blame or opening anybody up to allegations (though that might be the by-product). Gitmo, black sites, torture and water-boarding- these caused a lot more problems than they solved. We have over 800 prisoners in Gitmo that we can never set free, and a lot of them maybe innocent. We have tortured them and if they talk, our entire government is open to war crimes allegations etc.

The larger consequence is how it undermined and continues to undermine our values, our beliefs and our reputation as Americans. This is what allows our enemies to raise armies against us united by hatred.

[Akin]

01:15 PM on 05/09/2011

Prove that Jihad is motivated by a value failure in the detention practices of the USA.

While you're at it, let me say what Jihadis say motivates them: a desire to force the West into an Islamic Caliphate serving their geopolito-religious objectives (made-up word, but you get my drift).

They couldn't give 2 hoots about the stuff that liberal Lefties say they care about, actually! And values are only useful to a living society...

[William J Unverferth Sr]

03:01 PM on 05/09/2011

The analysis is all opinion and zero facts. That is why it is meaningless. Debate pro or anti enhanced interrogation all you want but to postulate possible alternative outcomes with only opinion as a basis and not actual case facts is pointless.

[Suresp77]

03:28 PM on 05/09/2011

ok, here are facts as of this morning, and of course the story keeps changing/ evolving but still:
- the name of the Courier came from Hassan Ghul, http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bin-laden-torture-20110505,0,4771512.story who was not waterboarded, probably not tortured at all. They figured out what his buttons were and got the name
- the torture used on KSM and Al Libi produced, lies and false information. As the article above says as well, torture is great for false confessions, not to extract the truth.

Now put this together with the study link another poster has included here and you have some pretty credible facts: so, looking back on this we can at least know that torture should be the very last resort, we are more likely to get actionable information by other, non torturous means.

[RDWidner]

12:50 PM on 05/10/2011

Since when is the los angelas Times a credible authority other than on which Hollywood starlet is sleeping with which leading man/woman?

[SFGiantsfan]

08:36 AM on 05/09/2011

While this is a nice debate, let's all keep in mind we are debating 'feelings' and 'opinions'. We don't have the facts. Until we know what intel was discovered from each technique, this is all pure speculation.

According to the CIA Director, looks like - rendition helped. Looks like - EITs helped. Looks like - GITMO helped. What % of intel were derived from those pieces, we don't know.

But to say - this works and this doesn't, is not keeping an open mind.

[Drumbum2112]

09:10 AM on 05/09/2011

The opinon of an expert is not supposed to be "keeping an open mind."

WHat we do know is that torture was agains the law, the experts claim it does not work, and these actions, and Gittmo played a major role in terrorist recruitment. The damage done is well known and great, the benefits gained are at best minor and only supported by those that where involved and should have been charged for thier crimes.

[RDWidner]

09:26 AM on 05/09/2011

I would pose that the Director of the CIA just might be considered an expert and propably has more access to the intelligence. He says it did help!

[blahblahblahreally]

09:23 AM on 05/09/2011

SFG I agree with you. Some people , you take away their credit card and they'll tell you everything you never wanted to know. Everyone's an idividual and has a different breaking point. And Drumbum well I guess Marqis de Cheney got somewhat spooked by the possibility of a plane flying into the WH and put his foot down.

[sunsetter]

08:34 AM on 05/09/2011

Revisionist history to appeal to the left. Nice.

[justhinking]

11:09 AM on 05/09/2011

What makes you so sure that it is not the right that is being placated? Frankly common sense is on the author's side. Torture does not help and hurts us as a nation.

[FatJimmy]

11:36 AM on 05/09/2011

This is a fabricated issue. Like so many other things during the Bush Administation, interrogation techniques were politicized to hurt the President. Unfortunately, this also hurt the intelligence community and the country. The same could be said about Abu Ghraib.
Have you heard much about the Kill team in Afghanistan? Suddenly the press are more responsible during this Administration. Go figure.