Shortly after President Obama announced that U.S. military forces killed Osama bin Laden, right-wing torture apologists seized the opportunity, stating, without any definitive evidence whatsoever, that information gleaned from torturing Al Qaeda detainees led to bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan. While reliable sources, such as Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said this week that the information did not come from torture (or to use the Bush administration’s term “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”), at this point it is at best unclear how this information was obtained.

What if a tiny piece of information that led to bin Laden came from torture or EITs? Today, Glenn Carle — who served 23 years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and for a time led the interrogation of a high value detainee — told ThinkProgress that if it the answer is yes, the right-wing will use that and say, “See torture works.” While Carle said it’s possible that EITs might provide information, that doesn’t mean they should ever be used:

CARLE: Well I change the tense and say not that they will use that but that they are using that within I think four hours of the announcement that bin Laden’s death.

Ultimately you get to an ends means debate. … The ends does not justify the means and you don’t build a policy, in this instance with regard to acceptable legal procedures, based upon the hypothetical, theoretical case which is five or ten standard deviations from the norm which happens one time in 5 million. What you do is you base your policies on an ever-changing calculus of probability likelihood and what is considered liked and works. And the answer to all of those questions should quite clearly exclude EITs. Is it possible that a specific piece of information from time to time would come from EITs? The answer is yes. To be fair the answer is yes. Does it justify using them? A categorical flat no.

Carle also said that during his time at CIA, “almost all the information obtained from EITs was recalled…because it was viewed as unreliable.”

Those on the right justifying torture argue that “harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier,” as the New York Times noted this morning. But the initial information on the courier is minuscule in comparison to the wider effort that led to bin Laden. “The critical point,” Carle noted, “is that intelligence is a painstaking slow process of building a mosaic. Little pieces of which are meaningless by themselves and together may paint a useful picture which is what happened in this case.”

When asked if any of the information that led to bin Laden could have been obtained without torture, Carle said, “Yes,” adding, “EITs are wrong, illegal, and they don’t work.”

Shortly after President Obama announced that U.S. military forces killed Osama bin Laden, right-wing torture apologists seized the opportunity, stating, without any definitive evidence whatsoever, that information gleaned from torturing Al Qaeda detainees led to bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan. While reliable sources, such as Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said this week that the information did not come from torture (or to use the Bush administration’s term “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”), at this point it is at best unclear how this information was obtained.

What if a tiny piece of information that led to bin Laden came from torture or EITs? Today, Glenn Carle — who served 23 years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and for a time led the interrogation of a high value detainee — told ThinkProgress that if it the answer is yes, the right-wing will use that and say, “See torture works.” While Carle said it’s possible that EITs might provide information, that doesn’t mean they should ever be used:

CARLE: Well I change the tense and say not that they will use that but that they are using that within I think four hours of the announcement that bin Laden’s death.

Ultimately you get to an ends means debate. … The ends does not justify the means and you don’t build a policy, in this instance with regard to acceptable legal procedures, based upon the hypothetical, theoretical case which is five or ten standard deviations from the norm which happens one time in 5 million. What you do is you base your policies on an ever-changing calculus of probability likelihood and what is considered liked and works. And the answer to all of those questions should quite clearly exclude EITs. Is it possible that a specific piece of information from time to time would come from EITs? The answer is yes. To be fair the answer is yes. Does it justify using them? A categorical flat no.

Carle also said that during his time at CIA, “almost all the information obtained from EITs was recalled…because it was viewed as unreliable.”

Those on the right justifying torture argue that “harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier,” as the New York Times noted this morning. But the initial information on the courier is minuscule in comparison to the wider effort that led to bin Laden. “The critical point,” Carle noted, “is that intelligence is a painstaking slow process of building a mosaic. Little pieces of which are meaningless by themselves and together may paint a useful picture which is what happened in this case.”

When asked if any of the information that led to bin Laden could have been obtained without torture, Carle said, “Yes,” adding, “EITs are wrong, illegal, and they don’t work.”

Cross-posted at the Wonk Room.

Last night on Fox News’ Sean Hannity Show, former Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld backtracked on a previous statement he made about the use of information gained from torture. Rumsfeld told Newsmax this week that “beneficial” information about Osama bin Laden had not been obtained through waterboarding or “harsh treatment,” but he told Hannity the exact opposite last night:

RUMSFELD: I’m told there was some confusion today on some programs…suggesting that I indicated that no one who was waterboarded at Guantanamo provided any information on this. That’s just not true. What I said was no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the U.S. military…Three people were waterboarded by the CIA…and then later brought to Guantanamo. In fact, as you point out, the information that came from those individuals was critically important.“

Rumsfeld also agreed with Hannity that “if he [Obama] had had his way, and Democrats had their way, we wouldn’t have had this intelligence.” Watch it:

Before the interview, Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn accused ThinkProgress of using his boss’s previous quote “cynically” and taking the statement “out of context.” But Rumsfeld’s original statement to Newsmax was quite clear, and the conservative outlet ran the interview under the headline, “Rumsfeld Exclusive: There Was No Waterboarding of Courier Source.”

Rumsfeld’s original position was more accurate, according to numerous sources who are familiar with the intelligence that led to Bin Laden. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor recently summed up a key flaw in the argument that waterboarding was integral to the mission, saying, “The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003.”

Rumsfeld and others have pointed to the comments of CIA Director Leon Panetta on NBC Nightly News this week as proof that waterboarding was instrumental in the intelligence trail that led to Bin Laden. Panetta never actually connected the dots between finding Bin Laden and waterboarding. He simply said that some of the detainees who provided key pieces of intelligence had been waterboarded at some point — an obvious fact — without saying that it was the waterboarding that caused them to turn over the information.

The New York Times’ definitive account of the intelligence trail that led to Bin Laden concluded, “harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier and exposing his hide-out.”

In fact, two of the prisoners subjected to the harshest treatment — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times — repeatedly lied under torture about the critical piece of intel about the courier. Mohammed has been frequently invoked by conservatives in recent days as the paramount example that waterboarding works. Abu Faraj Al-Libbi, another Al Qaeda leader whose usefulness has been cited by conservatives, also misled interrogators about the courier.

The detainee who provided the most important actionable intelligence about the courier, Al Qaeda operative Hassan Ghul, was not waterboarded, and was described by one official as being “quite cooperative.”

This conservative effort to reopen the torture debate appears to be little more than an attempt to attack President Obama at a moment of strength and distract from that fact that Bush failed to catch Bin Laden.

Our guest bloggers are Joshua Kilberg and Dane Rowlands, terrorism experts at The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, Canada

Many people will greet the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death with a sense of relief. The families of his victims will likely see his death by an American bullet as a fitting retribution. As a symbolic act, his death is a coup for the Obama administration. But beyond the relief and symbolism, is the tradition of targeting terrorist group leaders simply an exercise in revenge, or is it good policy?

In a research project currently underway at Carleton University we examined almost 250 of the most important terrorist and insurgent groups operating between 1970 and 2007, with more than 130 cases of terrorist group leaders captured or killed. The initial evidence indicates that the killing of a leader is not systematically associated with a terrorist group’s termination or even a clear reduction in its pace of operations. Instead, the operational consequences of killing terrorist leaders are more complex.

In some cases, the death of a leader is connected to the demise of the group, as in the 1997 killing of Néstor Cerpa Cartolini by Peruvian commandos. After the death of their leader, an already diminished Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement effectively collapsed.

Along the same lines, the bombing death of Abu Musab al-Zarkawi in 2006, leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was followed by a temporary decrease in the number of attacks lasting for several months. However, the attacks eventually resumed as if nothing had happened. Only after a surge in U.S. troops combined with the so-called “Awakening” was there a lasting reduction in Al Qaeda attacks along with other incidents of Iraqi sectarian violence.

At the other extreme, however, the killing of a leader may be followed by an increased operational tempo. When the Filipino military killed Abu Sayyaf’s leader Abdurajik Abubakar Janjalani in a gun battle in late 1998, the group reached its zenith of terrorist attacks over the next four years.

Given these varied outcomes, can we predict the effects of what will happen to al Qaeda now that Bin Laden is dead? There are two competing views. Former CIA operative Marc Sageman contends that continuous pressure from the United States and its allies has long since marginalized the central command of Al Qaeda and bin Laden himself. By contrast, Bruce Hoffman of RAND argues that Al Qaeda retains a functional and lethal core of bin Laden associates, and his death represents a cataclysmic blow to the organization.

Our research suggests that the effect of killing a leader depends on the organization’s structure. Terrorist groups that are either very centralized or decentralized seem largely immune to isolated leadership targeting because the former have a framework for replacement and continuity while the latter have no key people to kill. However, groups with intermediate levels of centralization — such as post-9/11 al Qaeda — are generally more vulnerable to leadership targeting and experience, at least an initial operational decline.

Unfortunately, predicting the effects of killing a specific terrorist leader remains a guessing game. Perhaps the only clear effects are in the states that the terrorists have targeted. Killing a terrorist leader provides a catharsis for an emotionally wounded and grieving population in search of both revenge and justice. There may also be an important political payoff for government leaders who can burnish their security credentials by pointing to dead terrorists; President Obama’s popularity won’t be hurt by having the hunt for bin Laden succeed on his watch when success eluded his predecessor.