Until the program was temporarily suspended in 2006, intelligence officials say, well over half of the information our government had about al Qaeda—how it operates, how it moves money, how it communicates, how it recruits operatives, how it picks targets, how it plans and carries out attacks—came from the interrogation of terrorists in CIA custody.
Consider that for a moment: without this capability, more than half of what we knew about the enemy would have disappeared.
Former CIA Director George Tenet has declared: “I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than what the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us.”
Former CIA Director Mike Hayden has said: “The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work.”
Former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte has said: “[T]his is a very, very important capability to have. This has been one of the most valuable, if not the most valuable … human intelligence program with respect to al Qaeda. It has given us invaluable information that has saved American lives. So it is very, very important that we have this kind of capability.”
Former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has said: “We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened.”
Even Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, has acknowledged: “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.”
Leon Panetta, Obama’s CIA Director, has said: “Important information was gathered from these detainees. It provided information that was acted upon.”
And John Brennan, Obama’s Homeland Security Advisor, when asked in an interview if enhanced interrogation techniques were necessary to keep America safe, replied: “Would the U.S. be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact, able to carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities? I would say yes.”
Indeed, the official assessment of our intelligence community is that, were it not for the CIA interrogation program, “al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland.”
And in his first forty-eight hours in office, President Barack Obama shut the program down.
Marc Thiessen is the author of Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack. For more information go to: www.courtingdisaster.com
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