Senior Airman Gino Reyes/U.S. Air Force
Spc. Emely Nieves from the Puerto Rico Army National Guard guards her post over the Joint Task Force Guantanamo detention facility at sunrise, Jan. 7, 2011.
Article Highlights
- Wikileaks files reveal details of bin Laden operation
- How #Wikileaks could have blown the operation that killed bin Laden
- The Wikileaks files that showed enhanced interrogations work
This article appears in the November/December 2011 issue of World Affairs Journal
In his new memoir, In My Time, former Vice President Dick Cheney declares that the CIA's enhanced interrogation program "provided intelligence that enabled us to prevent attacks and save lives" as well as important intelligence "we relied on to find [Osama] bin Laden." The evidence backing Cheney's claims is overwhelming-as is the tenacity of those who continue to deny it. Former CIA director Michael Hayden has compared these CIA "deniers" to "‘birthers' who, even in the face of clear contrary evidence, take as an article of faith that President Obama was not born in the United States" and "9/11 ‘truthers' who, despite all evidence to the contrary ... persist in claiming that 9/11 was a Bush Administration plot."
"WikiLeaks may very nearly have blown the operation that killed Osama bin Laden."
If the CIA "deniers" won't accept the word of the former vice president, and the four CIA directors who have testified that CIA interrogations produced invaluable intelligence, perhaps they will believe WikiLeaks. Earlier this year, WikiLeaks released a trove ofdocuments it dubbed the "Gitmo Files." I doubt it was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's intent to provide still additional evidence of the effectiveness ofCIA interrogations, but that is precisely what his "Gitmo Files" do.
View the full text of this article at www.worldaffairsjournal.org.
Marc A. Thiessen is a visiting scholar at AEI
