On Morning Joe this morning, Joe and others were ballyhooing the use of waterboarding on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and how the information he provided eventually lead to the location of Bin Laden's courier and, hence, Bin Laden himself. Joe said something to effect of, "This time it worked."
It didn't.
And Morning Joe isn't alone. Much of the wingnut right is crediting the Bush administration's enhanced interrogation techniques (torture) with leading to the death of Bin Laden.
Crediting torture is, of course, way, way, way wrong.
Just because torture was used on KSM doesn't mean Torture = Bin Laden Killed. In fact, it's a huge stretch. The so-called efficacy of torture doesn't preclude the efficacy of traditional interrogation techniques. In other words, they could have used traditional techniques and retrieved the information more effectively.
How do we know this?
Because the AP makes it clear that KSM gave up Bin Laden's courier while being interrogated using traditional interrogation techniques.
Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.
Brian Beutler has more.
So anyone who credits waterboarding for leading to the assassination of Bin Laden is either using fallacious logic or is lying or has been misinformed about how the process went down -- in some cases all three.