Gitmo, The Gift That Keeps on Giving

How happy must liberals be today to know that the enhanced interrogation techniques employed at Gitmo helped their rainbows and unicorns president order the assassination of a foreign national?

Former George W. Bush administration intelligence and national security officials tell The Daily Caller that the intelligence President Barack Obama acted on when authorizing the mission to kill al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was likely obtained during enhanced interrogations and/or at the Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) detention facilities.

One such official, Steve Yates, who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney until 2005, said the intelligence had to have come from detainees one way or another. Whether it was obtained at Gitmo or in some other overseas CIA facility where enhanced interrogation techniques were permissible, or some combination of the two, he’s not sure.

Liberals “can’t love the idea of having the ‘liberal-in-chief’ using the CIA to assassinate opponents,” Yates said, adding that it’s the exact opposite of what the “hippies from the flower generation and the anti-war movement generally” expect from a Democrat they helped elect president. “I think, generally, the administration has been mugged by reality when it comes to why these things exist, these programs, capabilities and the fact that evil exists in the world, that evil wasn’t George Bush and it wasn’t conservatives. These things [contentious Bush anti-terror measures] actually had a purpose that they [the Obama administration] didn’t care to discuss until they took the reins of power.”

In a Defense Department background briefing, a senior intelligence official said that, “key information was gleaned from detainees. And that detainee reporting provided insights into the bin Laden courier network. And so it did — it did contribute, you know, to the intelligence case. But it was by no means the only bit of information.”

The senior intelligence official then said, “it was multiple detainees debriefed over a number of years,” who provided the information, “and then it was a composite picture of the courier network and this particular courier that we were interested — that led us to this compound, that came out of that composite picture and then was developed further through other intelligence means.”

The administration is desperately trying to insist that waterboarding had nothing to do with the raid on bin Laden, but it's simply not true given that intelligence like this has to be developed over many years and using bits and pieces of information gathered from time-to-time.  There's no question that the enhanced techniques provided some of this information, and that Guantanamo Bay and the techniques employed there have helped keep Americans safe.