Since yesterday, the most ubiquitous right-wing meme on the web regarding the death of Osama bin Laden has been the one were, in a nutshell, “Bush deserves the credit. The information came from a Guantanamo detainee who was tortured. This is Bush’s achievement.” (Please also note how unashamed they are to claim the “credit” for the use of torture.) Think Progress:
Bush loyalists have been “irked” over the past 24 hours that they are not getting credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, arguing that their torture program helped bring about intelligence that led to the mission. Karl Rove said “the tools that President Bush put into place –- GITMO, rendition, enhanced interrogation” led to the successful operation. Similarly, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the mission “rested heavily on some of those controversial policies” from the Bush era.
In large part, this came up due to a report by The New York Times yesterday that the information came from a Guantanamo detainee:
The real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, whom the Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world.
Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The torture apologists immediately began making the rounds with the “torture was responsible for the bin Laden killing” meme, even though, former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, denied it:
The United States Department of Defense did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone. It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.
Today, when asked by a reporter if the information which led to the killing of bin Laden was a result of waterboarding detainees, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman, Diane Feinstein (D-CA), asserted that it absolutely was not the case. Sen. Feinstein:
We are in the process of a big study on the detention and interrogation of the detainees on the Intelligence Committee. The Republicans have pulled out of the study. So this has been carried out by the Democratic staff essentially. They have gone through more than 3 million emails, cables, pieces of paper looking for this.
To date, the answer to your question is no. Nothing has been found to indicate this came out of Guantanamo. And people were questioned, but there were no positive answers as to the identity of this number one courier.
Watch:
President Barack Hussein Obama, managed to accomplish in just two years what the Bush administration could not accomplish in eight years, and nothing the right-wing says, none of their preposterous delusions, can alter that fact.
As a commenter pointed out on another site, “The poor pathetic chickenhawks, racists, teabagging buffoons are so committed to their delusions that even the killing of National Enemy #1 - the result of a hands on, carefully orchestrated mission conceived and executed under the command of President Barack Hussein Obama - does not elicit even a sliver of contrition; not so much as a, "Well done, SIR," or a sheepish, "Gotta give the man credit for this one.”
Nice try, Teabagger buffoons. No sale.
Adding….and do try to get used to the competence exhibited by this president, and this administration--something we haven’t seen much of for a very long time, and certainly didn’t get from President George W. Bush.
Additional reading…..Conservative Andrew Sullivan: The Big Lie: Torture Got Bin Laden and Think Progress’ ANALYSIS: Bush’s Lackluster Hunt For Bin Laden
Image source: Bob Cesca
