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.

The New York Times reported today that some of the information that led U.S. intelligence officials to ultimately determine Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts was obtained from detainees at Guantanamo Bay:

The real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, whom the Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world.

Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Torture apologists on the right immediately extrapolated from this passage in the Times that this information was gleaned from using “enhanced interrogation” techniques (i.e. torture). Former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Theissen wrote that “it turns out the detainees in question were KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libi” (although it’s unclear how he knows this) and noted that both were tortured. Thus:

Before coming to Gitmo, both were held by the CIA as part of the agency’s enhanced interrogation program, and provided the information that led to bin Laden’s death after undergoing interrogation by the CIA. In other words, the crowning achievement of Obama’s presidency came as a direct result of the CIA interrogation program he has denigrated and shut down.

Bush torture program architect John Yoo agreed:

Also, buried in the stories may be yet another sign of the vindication of the Bush administration’s war on terror policies. Anonymous government sources say that the al Qaeda courier who led our intelligence people to bin Laden was a protege of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks who was captured in 2002, subjected to enhanced interrogation methods, and yielded a trove of intelligence on al Qaeda.

Dick Cheney said today that “it wouldn’t be surprising” the intel came from Bush’s torture program. However, there is currently no evidence to suggest that the detainees that provided the information that led to bin Laden were subject to torture. And Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who presumably has some knowledge about what went on at Gitmo, today threw some cold water on this theory:

“The United States Department of Defense did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone. It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.”

Without any evidence, and without Rumsfeld’s blessing, it seems like conservatives are going to have to work a little bit harder at trying to take credit for bin Laden’s death.

The Bush administration has long maintained they had not decided to invade Iraq until the days before it actually began and that they did “everything” they could to “avoid war in Iraq.” President Bush even claimed that the “American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war.”

Yet there is evidence that the Bush administration, from its very early days, was actively plotting to go to war with the Arab country. From a British memo that noted that “Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme” to memoirs by administration members Richard Clarke and Paul O’Neill, there have been numerous disclosures that strongly suggest that the Bush administration was plotting a war against Iraq while recognizing it was not a threat to the United States.

Now, with the help of a Freedom of Information Act request, the National Security Archive has obtained a newly declassified document that details talking points that emerged from a meeting between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and CENTCOM Commander General Tommy Franks in November 2001.

The talking points mainly revolve around the logistical planning for a war in Iraq. They detail the “decapitation” of the Iraqi government by U.S. forces and make regime change the goal. Interestingly, they already mention U.S. forces “coming out of Afghanistan” to join the invasion of Iraq. Yet the most alarming part of the document is a bullet point titled, “How start?” (which is a discussion that actually appears after the planning of the entire war). The participants in the Rumsfeld-Frank meeting discussed possible ways to provoke a conflict with Iraq, including an attack by Saddam Hussein against the Kurdish north, the U.S. discovering a “Saddam connection” to 9/11 or the anthrax attacks, or a dispute over WMD inspections. It appears from the language of the talking points that the Bush administration had already decided to go to war with Iraq and was looking for an opportunity to invade:

Another document obtained by the National Security Archive shows that the Bush State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research created an assessment of international support for a war against Iraq in December 2001. It noted that the “UK’s Blair would publicly support a US decision to bomb Iraq but would face considerable criticism.” It worried that going to war in Iraq could “bring radicalization of British Muslims, the great majority whom opposed the September 11 attacks but are increasingly restive about what they see as an anti-Islamic campaign.” These fears appear to have been prescient, as in July 2005 British Muslim extremists apparently radicalized by the war in Iraq detonated bombs throughout London.