U.S. counterterrorism officials are reacting angrily to ex-Vice President Dick Cheney's claim that waterboarding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times was a "success" that produced actionable intelligence.
"Cheney is full of crap," one intelligence source with decades of experience said Tuesday.
Another retired counterterrorism official who read reports when they arrived in Washington detailing the confessions of Mohammed, known as "KSM," said most of the information he coughed up during the waterboarding sessions involved things he thought his CIA-contract interrogators already knew, or were just his ideas for mayhem.
"Most of the (cables) were reports of actions that KSM was only remotely thinking of undertaking - they didn't even reach the planning stage," the retired counterterrorism official said. "So it's a bit of a stretch for Bush administration officials to say these were attacks they had disrupted."
On Monday, Cheney complained that President Obama had declassified Justice Department torture memos - but not all of them.
"They didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified," Cheney told Fox News' Sean Hannity.
A third senior former counterterrorism official who worked at the CIA and read the reports of KSM's grilling said there was "a lot of speculation" at Langley about possible plots, based on what the Al Qaeda "military commander" said during the waterboarding sessions.
"Just after he was caught, I remember the warning that came out about flights to and from the Pacific rim," the former operative recalled.
One remarkable fact is that at a hearing on Feb. 7, 2008, ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden said waterboarding was stopped by CIA officials in the early spring of 2003. A senator asked when the technique was shelved and Hayden replied, "Just a few weeks short of five years (ago)."
How can this be possible? KSM was captured Mar. 1, 2003. Does it mean KSM was waterboarded 183 times that March before it was stopped? A CIA spokesman declined comment or explanation.
"It was an intense period," recalled one of the former officials.
In March 2007, KSM confessed at an open hearing in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hatching 30 plots including the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Former CIA official John Brennan, who now serves as Obama's White House counterterrorism adviser, told the Daily News then that Mohammed was "quite creative, and threw out a lot of seeds to see if they would actually germinate."
"They didn't have the people or capability to do all of those," Brennan said of the 30 plots KSM claimed to have conceived of.
GOSH! GEE! You mean a prisoner under torture would ACTUALLY tell interrogators what they would like to hear, just to stop the pain? Does that mean the any information gleaned from torture just MAY NOT be reliable?
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