Leon Panetta, Hayden and several others have verified it works....Twisting the words of Rumsfeld does not help your case, anymore than blatantly trying to twist Panetta's words.
Waterboarding worked...It's a non-torterous tool that should always be in the box......PERIOD!
I'm concerned with american lives. I could care less about bleeding heart loony liberals and their abject loony nonsense.
Here is the direct quote of exactly what Rumsfeld said on the subject in full, with no twisting possible:
Hayden and Panetta, far from claiming the intel used to find bin Laden was gleaned during waterboarding, instead both mention when asked that the intel came from high-value detainees (KSM and al-Libbi) who "had been" and "were held" at places where they were subject to enhanced interrogation. We know KSM was waterboarded in 2003, that's public record they're verifying, but quite clearly neither of them claims the information that the CIA says it first got in 2007 was from those waterboarding sessions.
Removed from the sexy "confirms waterboarding led to Osama" headline used in right-wing press right now, the actual quotes don't do that.
Here's what Panetta said on the subject:
Here's what Hayden said on the subject:
ZAKARIA: So you took news of this courier in to President Bush many years ago, right?
HAYDEN: We did. I think it was about four years ago, in 2007. We - we had built up sufficient lead information on the name of the courier that we thought it was ready for presidential primetime. So we briefed it to the president, not as something eminent but as our most promising lead to track down Bin Laden because, frankly, Fareed, the trail had been quite cold for a - a long period of time.
ZAKARIA: And why had it been cold, General? Because you had these huge bounties out on his head, and one of the things that people used to always say to me in the region was, gosh, this guy must inspire fanatical devotion and loyalty. The Americans are willing to pay $25 million and nobody turns up to - to claim the reward.
HAYDEN: Yes. Well, a - a couple of thoughts on that.
Clearly, he was concerned with his own operational security. Those people who knew where he was was a very small group of folks. $25 million translates very well into an American or European context. Frankly, Fareed, we learned that those kinds of numbers really don't have the same kind of meaning in the - in the tribal region of Pakistan.
And, most importantly, he went off the grid. And by that I mean the - the telecommunications and electronic grid, which has been a very powerful tool for us for such a long period of time. And it was - it was that absence from electronic communications that convinced us we know he's communicating. He must be doing it through human beings. We need to find and follow the couriers. And that was the hypothesis with which we went into this four years ago or so.
ZAKARIA: So this is classic human intelligence? You had people on the ground. They talked to people. They developed relationships. Is that right?
HAYDEN: It is. But it also came out of detainee interrogations.
One - one of the more prominent leads we had at the beginning of this exercise was partial identity information that came out of detainees that we were holding in our so-called black sites. And then, from that point, we used all the tools of intelligence.
I can't go into detail, but, I can assure you, it was signals intelligence and imagery intelligence and human intelligence that allowed us to build this. And - and Fareed, this wasn't done one brick at a time. This was actually done one pebble at a time. This is classic analytic work.
ZAKARIA: Tell us for a moment about that issue of interrogation, because, you know, there's something of a debate here about whether the extraordinary methods, the ones that have aroused so much controversy, that people like Colin Powell and John McCain came out against, were those methods crucial to getting information that has led to Bin Laden?
HAYDEN: Well, let me put it to you this way, Fareed. First of all, I'm proud to be a citizen of a country that feels it needs to debate these kinds of issues. But, as we debate them, the debate has to be fact-based. And the lead information I referred to a few minutes ago did come from CIA detainees, against whom enhanced interrogation techniques had been used, not to elicit specific bits of information, but move them from their initial air of defiance into a zone of cooperation.
So the facts of the matter are people against whom we used these interrogation techniques provided us at least one of the strings of information that led to last weekend's events.
ZAKARIA: There are people who say, though, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the - kind of - one of the chiefs, one of the planners of 9/11, perhaps the chief planner, denied even knowing the courier. And actually that's what tipped some of the interrogators off, that it wasn't some extraordinary methods.
HAYDEN: I think the actual - the actual facts are that he gave us some - some very partial lead information at the beginning. As we developed the information, we went back to him, and he and another detainee were so demonstrative - atypically demonstrative in rejecting knowledge of this individual, that that in itself turned into lead information.
And I'd have to suggest, Fareed, if - if he had not been largely cooperating with us, this would not have been anomalous behavior. And so it's all of a piece.
Pay attention to precisely what they say.
That they used enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, against some of these detainees is all that either confirms. That the people who gave us the intelligence had those methods used on them at some point. We know that. We know KSM was waterboarded and we know he was a source. He doesn't say the waterboarding led to the information and especially not that the information was acquired during waterboarding, something Rumsfeld explicitly denies. He doesn't say the waterboarding in 2003 produced the intel we didn't acquire until 2007 because that defies logic and the forward profession of time.
Hayden even admits that in the period between when KSM was waterboarded in 2003 and when they got the intel in 2007, the "trail had gone cold" and been cold for "a long time." That rather obviously suggests that whatever KSM said in 2003 during waterboarding isn't what led to bin Laden, but rather it was new information years later without the waterboarding, otherwise they'd have had the courier's name four extra years (which NO ONE claims and all evidence says is not the case) and the search for bin Laden wouldn't be "cold." Even in his best efforts to justify the torture/waterboarding of which he is a major proponent, he states that the "enhanced interrogation" did not lead to any specific bits of information like a courier's name, only that he thinks it made him compliant, but 4 more years of keeping the courier's name a secret doesn't sound much like compliance.
Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, and the CIA all agree that they got the name of the courier in 2007. The last time KSM was tortured was 2003, the last time waterboarding was used, was 2003. So he didn't tell them the name of the courier that led to bin Laden during waterboarding, he continued to not tell them for 4 more years, and only during normal interrogation in 2007 did he give up the intel we'd been looking for all that time.
These are just factors which none of the people involved dispute.
Now in addition to the fact that neither Panetta nor Hayden say waterboarding/torture is how we got the intel, and the CIA timeline has KSM being waterboarded in 2003 and not giving us the courier's name until 2007, there's the fact that Hayden and Panetta as people who authorized and oversaw waterboarding (which is now, as it had been for decades prior, defined as a torture technique and thus illegal) have a pretty obvious ulterior motive for wanting to depict waterboarding as effective as a means of justifying why it was done. Even with that motivation, neither actually makes the claim that the intel came from waterboarding.
Then there's the fact that Donald Rumsfeld, someone else with the same clear motivation for wanting to justify the use of waterboarding since he too authorized and oversaw its controversial use, despite that motivation and how much he'd love to be able to justify torture by saying waterboarding got the intel says directly in unequivocal terms that the information was gleaned from specifically not enhanced interrogation techniques but during normal interrogation many years later (as numerous other sources agree).
What you come away with is no proof or evidence waterboarding got the intel and a mountain of it that it didn't.
Again, all the facts are on one side of this equation, all pointing to the same clear conclusion.
I wonder if the terrorists fear the drones more then the water board? 
