McCain: Torture Didn't Net Bin Laden

Politico reports:

Torture didn’t lead the United States to Osama bin Laden, and the mission shouldn’t be used to justify the country’s use of it in the past, argues Sen. John McCain.

Writing on Thursday’s Washington Post op-ed page, the Arizona Republican — and himself a former prisoner of war — said “enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding have no place in U.S. treatment of prisoners of war. He also dismisses the claims some Republicans in Congress and former Bush administration officials have been making about the tough handling of detainees leading directly to bin Laden.

“I don’t mourn the loss of any terrorist’s life. What I do mourn is what we lose when, by official policy or official neglect, we confuse or encourage those who fight this war for us to forget that best sense of ourselves,” McCain wrote. “Through the violence, chaos and heartache of war, through deprivation and cruelty and loss, we are always Americans, and different, stronger and better than those who would destroy us.”

The torture debate was reignited by news of the bin Laden mission.

Bush-era attorney general Michael Mukasey, for instance, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal that alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding” and “loosed a torrent of information — including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.”

But Mukasey’s conclusions are false, said McCain , who cited information he said he got directly from CIA Director Leon Panetta. “The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times,” McCain said. Intelligence officials first learned the nickname of bin Laden’s courier –Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — “from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured.” And, he added, “None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in Al Qaeda.”