For Immediate Release: May 3, 2011

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• Senator John McCain Denounces Waterboarding
  • “I opposed waterboarding and similar so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ before Osama bin Laden was brought to justice. And I oppose them now. I do not believe they are necessary to our success in our war against terrorists, as the advocates of these techniques claim they are … it was not torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees that got us the major leads that ultimately enabled our intelligence community to find Osama bin Laden.”¹
• Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan Does Not Credit Waterboarding for Leads
  • Asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” whether waterboarding was used to get details that led to the Al Qaeda leader, Brennan said, “not to my knowledge.” “There was no one critical bit of information provided by either a detainee or somebody else,” he said. “What happened is there was a mosaic appearing over time and by diligent work and very strong work we pieced it together and it brought us to Abbottabad.”²
  • “A number of leads have been pursued over the years. I think what this operation demonstrates is that there are some very, very good people who have been following bin Laden for many, many years. They have been very persistent. They have pulled on every thread. And as a result of that diligence and their analytic capabilities, they were able to track this and continue to build a body of evidence that suggested, circumstantially, that bin Laden was at that compound. That’s what they did.”³
• Mike Hayden, Former CIA Director Got No Intel From Waterboarding
  • “I’m willing to concede the point that no one gave us valuable or actionable intelligence while they were, for example, being waterboarded.”⁴
• Senator Lindsey Graham Says Don’t Celebrate Waterboarding
  • “This idea we caught bin Laden because of waterboarding I think is a misstatement. This whole concept of how we caught bin Laden is a lot of work over time by different people and putting the puzzle together. I do not believe this is a time to celebrate waterboarding, I believe this is a time to celebrate hard work.”⁵
• Senator Dianne Feinstein Says Torture Wasn’t Source
  • “To the best of our knowledge, based on a look, none of it came as a result of harsh interrogation techniques. In my mind, nothing justifies those procedures. “⁶
• Representative Ron Paul Doubts Usefulness of Torture
  • “One thing I heard people talking about [after Bin Laden's death] that I think is very, very dangerous: That a useful tool in foreign policy and having this perpetual undeclared war worldwide against terrorism is that torture is a useful tool. I think that is very, very dangerous, and yet that is what they talk about.”⁷
• Former Officials Credit Standard Interrogation Techniques
  • [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation.⁸
  • A former US National Security official: It was not until later, after waterboarding was suspended because it and other harsh techniques became heatedly debated, that Mohammed told interrogators about the existence of a courier particularly close to bin Laden, a fragmentary tip that touched off a years-long manhunt that ended in bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. special forces on Sunday.⁹
  • “They waterboarded KSM (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) 183 times and he still didn’t give the guy up,” said one former U.S. counterterrorism official who asked not to be identified. “Come on. And you want to tell me that enhanced interrogation techniques worked?”¹⁰
• Interrogators Say Torture Didn’t Get KSM to Talk
  • A statement from nine leading interrogators and intelligence officials states: “The use of waterboarding and other so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques almost certainly prolonged the hunt for Bin Laden and complicated the jobs of professional U.S. interrogators who were trying to develop useful information from unwilling sources like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed … We believe that the U.S. would have learned more from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other high value detainees if, from the beginning, professional interrogators had a chance to question them using the sophisticated, yet humane, approaches approved by U.S. law.”¹¹
  • Mark Fallon, a former interrogator and special agent in charge of the criminal investigation task force at Guantanamo Bay: “I was privy to the information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at the time. I’m not aware of any information or intelligence that was a product from water boarding. If we look at the facts we know of the case right now where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a mentor, this was a protégé of him. Had the information come out during the water boarding, we would have captured the courier sooner… I’ve seen no information that the infliction of pain equates to the elicitation of accurate information… it’s a shame to diminish the incredible work that went on through the intelligence community with analysts and case officers that led to bin Laden’s capture. So let’s not diminish that accomplishment because that’s a significant event in our history. To try to cheapen it by saying that some event in water boarding years ago led to this is a disservice to our service members.”¹²
  • Getting the name of a courier, said expert interrogator Andrew Alexander, “happened a year after he was waterboarded, which tells me from my experience that I saw in Iraq, that the waterboarding actually slowed down the acquisition of intelligence by a year.”¹³
  • Glenn L. Carle, a retired C.I.A. officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002, said that coercive techniques “didn’t provide useful, meaningful, trustworthy information.” He said that while some of his colleagues defended the measures, “everyone was deeply concerned and most felt it was un-American and did not work.”¹⁴
• National Security Officials Call Upon President Obama to Denounce Torture
  • A letter sent to President Obama from 47 national security officials asks the president to denounce torture in the wake of bin Laden’s death: “In light of the debate following the death of Osama bin Laden, we urge you to make an unequivocal statement that torture is illegal, immoral, and un-American. The use of torture undermines our national security and intelligence gathering efforts. The United States must lead by our core principles and condemn torture.”¹⁵
• General David Petraeus Opposes the Use of Torture
  • “I think it is imperative that we do indeed live our values… So I feel pretty strongly about this, I think that you undermine your cause by practices such as waterboarding and other so called enhancements and at the end of the day I don’t think they, certainly are not worth it and in fact do cause us problems in the long run.”¹⁶