Thaindian News

Washington, May 5 (ANI): The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) subjected a Pakistan-born Al Qaeda suspect to harsh interrogation techniques in a secret prison in Poland to get the name of the mysterious courier who was regularly in touch with Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

According to the Los Angeles Times, in 2004, the CIA approved the use of sleep deprivation, slapping, nudity, water dousing and other coercive techniques on Hassan Ghul to get the information that they urgently required.

Ghul, however, was not waterboarded, the notorious interrogation technique that simulates drowning and which critics describe as torture.

Two other CIA prisoners - Al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his successor, Abu Faraj Libbi - gave their interrogators false information about the courier. Mohammed was waterboarded repeatedly, U.S. officials said.

Those lies also played a role in the decade-long manhunt, however. Over time, CIA analysts viewed them as evidence.

“The fact that they were covering it up, suggested he was important,” a U.S. official said.

In the end, intelligence gleaned from interviews with numerous detainees, high-tech eavesdropping and surveillance, and other investigative spadework provided insights on people close to Bin Laden.

No one source or bit of intelligence was so decisive or crucial that it instantly solved the puzzle or ended the painstaking hunt for the world’s most wanted terrorist, officials said.

They stressed that none of the three most critical pieces of information - the courier’s name, the area of Pakistan in which he operated and the location of the compound in which Bin Laden was living - came from detainees.

CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said it was impossible to know whether the same information could have been obtained without using those techniques, which have been banned under President Obama.

“The debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches, I think, is always going to be an open question,” Panetta told NBC News on Tuesday.

Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, said: “It took years of collection and analysis from many different sources to develop the case that enabled us to identify this compound and reach a judgment that Bin Laden was likely to be living there.”

He added: “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.” (ANI)