Some Republicans just can't accept that fact that waterboarding didn't provide the crucial intelligence leading to the death of Osama bin Laden.The Associated Press reported Monday that the enhanced interrogations techniques put in place by the Bush White House did not reveal intelligence about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the courier that eventually led the U.S. to bin Laden.
That was confirmed by MSNBC, by way of deputy national security adviser John Brennan, but this does not seem to have fazed some top Republicans.
Here are five top Republicans who continue to be apologists for the interrogation methods that some refer to as torture.
1) Former Vice President Dick Cheney
"I would assume that the enhanced interrogation program that we put in place produced some of the results that led to bin Laden's ultimate capture," he told Fox News Monday.
2) Rep. Peter King (R-NY)
"Well I don’t know if everyone knows this or not, but you mentioned the fact that we obtained information several years ago, vital information about the courier for Obama [sic]," King explained to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. "We obtained that information through waterboarding. So for those who say that waterboarding doesn’t work, who say it should be stopped and never used again, we got vital information which directly led us to bin Laden."
"It came from an overseas prison where Khaled Sheik Mohammed was being interrogated. Waterboarding was used, and it was during the interrogation of Khaled Sheik Mohammed, through waterboarding, that this information was learned," he added.
3) Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC)
"The information that eventually led us to this compound was the direct result of enhanced interrogations; one can conclude if we had not used enhanced interrogations, we would not have come to yesterday's action," Burr said during a telephone interview with CNBC Monday.
4) Republican strategist Karl Rove
"I think the tools that President Bush put into place -- GITMO, rendition, enhanced interrogation, the vast effort to collect and collate this information -- obviously served his successor quite well," Rove proclaimed during Fox News' morning show Tuesday.
5) John Yoo, UC Berkeley law professor and author or the Bush "Torture Memo"
"Anonymous government sources say that the al Qaeda courier who led our intelligence people to bin Laden was a protege of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks who was captured in 2002, subjected to enhanced interrogation methods, and yielded a trove of intelligence on al Qaeda," Yoo wrote for The American. "Those same sources admit that interrogation of al Qaeda leaders, presumably by the CIA, yielded the identity of the courier. "
"Without the tough decisions taken by President Bush and his national security team, the United States could not have found and killed bin Laden. It is the continuity of policies in the war on terror that has brought success, not the misguided effort of the last two years to disavow them."
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