How the CIA Covered Up Its Lie on Torture and bin Laden

By Gareth Porter, Truthout | News Analysis

The Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report sheds new light on how the CIA created and then continued to protect its false claim that it found Osama bin Laden in part because of its abusive interrogation tactics.

The report presents detailed evidence based on reviewing millions of pages of CIA documents that the identification of bin Laden's courier who was eventually found to be living with the al-Qaeda leader in the Abbottabad compound had nothing to do with the CIA torture program.

And in revealing the new details about what the CIA knew and when it knew, the report documents for the first time the extraordinary mendacity of the CIA's senior managers in seeking to hide the truth from Congress, senior cabinet officers and the public.

From the moment bin Laden was killed, the CIA launched a determined new campaign to convince Congress and the public that its torture program had been key to locating bin Laden - and that the agency's operations people had tracked him down by a series of operations in which one operation yielded clues that brought still others and led ultimately to Abbottabad. That campaign ultimately extended to using the popular film Zero Dark Thirty to promote the agency's justification for torture.

The same day as the raid in Abbottabad, the CIA deputy director, Michael Morell, briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee, and two days later CIA director Leon Panetta himself led a second such briefing. In both briefings, the CIA asserted that interrogation of CIA detainees with "enhanced interrogation techniques" had "played a substantial role" in developing the intelligence that led to bin Laden, according to the committee report.

But the report shows that, contrary to the agency's claim, the CIA's abusive interrogation methods did not produce any information on bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, that did not become available from another authoritative source through traditional interrogation methods.

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http://truth-out.org/news/item/28060-how-the-cia-covered-up-its-lie-on-torture-and-bin-laden