Did harsh tactics pay off on bin Laden? Maybe

WASHINGTON —

An al-Qaida suspect who was subjected to harsh interrogation techniques at a secret CIA prison in early 2004 provided his interrogators with a clue — the pseudonym of a mysterious courier — that proved crucial to finding and killing Osama bin Laden, officials said Wednesday.

The CIA had approved use of sleep deprivation, slapping, nudity, water dousing and other coercive techniques at the now-closed CIA "black site" in Poland where the Pakistan-born detainee, Hassan Ghul, was held, according to a 2005 Justice Department memo, which cited Ghul by name. Two U.S. officials said Wednesday that some of those now-prohibited practices were directed at Ghul.

Ghul was not waterboarded, or subject to near-drowning, the most notorious interrogation technique and one that critics describe as torture.

Two other CIA prisoners — al-Qaida's operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libbi — gave their interrogators false information about the courier after they were waterboarded repeatedly, U.S. officials said.

Those lies also played a role in the decadelong manhunt, however. Over time, they were viewed as evidence by CIA analysts that bin Laden's top deputies were trying to shield a figure who might be a link to the al-Qaida leader's hideout, according to U.S. officials briefed on the analysis. "The fact that they were covering it up suggested he was important," a U.S. official said.

Pieces of puzzle

In the end, intelligence gained from interviews with numerous detainees, high-tech eavesdropping and surveillance, and other investigative spadework provided insights into people who were close to bin Laden. No one source or bit of intelligence was so decisive or critical that it instantly solved the puzzle or ended the hunt for the world's most-wanted terrorist, officials said.

The nuances of that complex chain of events were often lost Wednesday amid a renewed public debate about the efficacy and morality of coercive interrogations that the CIA carried out under President George W. Bush.

"I think the issue has been mischaracterized on both sides," said a former CIA official who was involved in internal debate over the so-called enhanced-interrogation-techniques (EITs) program at the time. "The people who say 'enhanced interrogation techniques' directly led to catching bin Laden are wrong, and the people who say they had nothing to do with it are also wrong."

The current CIA director, Leon Panetta, said it was impossible to know if the same information could have been gleaned without using those techniques, which have been banned under President Obama.

"The debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches, I think, is always going to be an open question," Panetta told NBC News.

Panetta did not say — and other administration officials adamantly denied — that coercive interrogation techniques directly led to finding bin Laden.

"It simply strains credulity to suggest that a piece of information that may or may not have been gathered eight years ago somehow directly led to a successful mission on Sunday," White House spokesman Jay Carney said. "That's just not the case."

"There is no way that information obtained by EITs was the decisive intelligence that led us directly to bin Laden," said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, using the shorthand for enhanced interrogation techniques.

"It took years of collection and analysis from many different sources to develop the case that enabled us to identify this compound, and reach a judgment that bin Laden was likely to be living there," Vietor said. "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."

The Bush administration abandoned waterboarding by 2004, and closed the CIA's secret web of prisons. All the detainees were transferred to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by 2007.

The Obama administration has forsworn those interrogation tactics, and the CIA no longer captures or interrogates terrorism suspects, the agency says. The CIA has increased the use of armed Predator drones and military commando raids to kill them, or passed intelligence tips to other governments to capture or kill them instead.

A weakness for food

Things were much different in January 2004, when Kurdish military forces in northern Iraq picked up Ghul, an al-Qaida courier who was carrying a letter sent by the Iraqi terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to bin Laden.

Ghul quickly disappeared into the CIA's network of secret prisons, and became one of 28 detainees subject to "enhanced interrogation techniques," according to the Justice Department memo, which was publicly released in 2009.

At first, his interrogators sought authorization to use "attention grasp, walling (slamming a detainee against a wall), facial hold, facial slap, wall standing, stress positions and sleep deprivation," according to the memo.

But the interrogators concluded that Ghul had steeled himself to resist physical pressure, the memo continues, so they switched to "more subtle interrogation measures designed to weaken (his) physical ability and mental desire to resist interrogation."

Those measures included "dietary manipulation, nudity, water dousing and abdominal slap." The team believed "those techniques would be especially helpful because he appeared to have a particular weakness for food and also seemed especially modest."

A U.S. official who has been briefed on Ghul's role in providing bin Laden information noted that "just because something was approved doesn't mean all of them were used," but did not dispute that force was used on Ghul.

"Ghul became relatively cooperative relatively quickly," the official said.

Ghul provided crucial information about the courier, including a nickname, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the official said. Ghul and other detainees identified al-Kuwaiti as a protégé of Mohammed's and a trusted assistant of al-Libbi's.

A special prosecutor is investigating whether CIA officers exceeded their legal authority in using the techniques, and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee are nearing completion of a study of the interrogations after reviewing some 3 million documents, said Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Asked about the information that led to bin Laden, Feinstein said: "To the best of our knowledge ... none of it came as a result of harsh interrogation practices."

Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, a member of the intelligence committee, has a different view: "The initial thread that they started to pull on came after enhanced interrogation. From that you can take it to a debate on where you go with that. But I don't think there's any doubt that it was after enhanced interrogation that they got the initial thread."