Rob O’Neill, the SEAL Team Six member who shot and killed Osama bin Laden, appeared on Fox’s “Hannity” to defend the use of enhanced interrogation on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying it helped located bin Laden. (VIDEO: TheDC Interview: Rob O’Neill, The SEAL Who Shot Osama Bin Laden)
O’Neill said the military should “use what works” when interrogating suspected terrorists. “What works are going to be techniques that do work: playing loud music, sleep deprivation, stress positions, something that makes them uncomfortable, something that gets them out of their comfort zone… It’s going to work. They’re going to change their tune.”
He strongly contested the notion that enhanced interrogation techniques constituted torture. “Torture, if you can walk away from it as soon as it ends, it’s not torture. These are just techniques that can be used to find the truth.” (VIDEO: Dick Cheney: ‘I Have No Sympathy’ For Tortured Detainees)
O’Neill noted that the United States waterboarded him as part of his training. “They used all kinds of techniques on us to make it very, very uncomfortable. We have something called surf torture, drown proofing. If some of these Human [Rights] Watch people saw field training, they’d probably try to cancel it, and we’d lose some of our best military personnel in the world.”
“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave us intelligence that led to the courier that led to bin Laden,” O’Neill said. “And we had him for a long, long time, and it’s not because we got nicer and we served better tea. It’s because they were using techniques that weren’t torture but they were definitely uncomfortable, like I said, they got him out of his comfort zone. Once he was pushed to a point, they were relieved and he started to talk. It’s simple interrogation tactics that work.”