http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/you-lie-cia-chiefs-say-they-saved-lives-were-ignored-by-senate-dems/article/2557154You lie: CIA chiefs say they 'saved lives,' were ignored by Senate Dems
BY PAUL BEDARD | DECEMBER 9, 2014 | 2:36 PM
Top former CIA officials who designed and implemented the al Qaeda interrogation system decried as torture in a Senate Democratic report issued Tuesday said they were never quizzed by the partisan investigators and rebuffed claims the program didn’t save American lives.
To make their point, the officials created a website to fight back,
www.ciasavedlives.com.
On it, they said that the Senate Intelligence Committee Democratic staff “interviewed no CIA officers responsible for establishing, implementing, or evaluating the program’s effectiveness. Let us repeat, no one at the CIA was interviewed.”
Added to that blunder is the claim in the report that no lives were saved as a result of the tough interrogation practices, such as waterboarding, against the world’s most dangerous terrorists.
“The report defies credulity by saying that the interrogation program did not produce any intelligence value. In fact, the program led to the capture of senior al Qaida leaders, including helping to find Osama bin Laden, and resulted in operations that led to the disruption of terrorist plots that saved thousands of American and allied lives,” said the website’s opening announcement.
And in the Wall Street Journal, former CIA Directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden, and former CIA Deputy Directors John E. McLaughlin, Albert M. Calland and Stephen R. Kappes detailed the lives saved. In just one of many examples, they said that interrogation provided information on a 17-person “second wave” targeting the West Coast that was thwarted after 9/11.
“It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives, thereby removing them from the battlefield. It led to the disruption of terrorist plots and prevented mass casualty attacks, saving American and Allied lives. It added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as an organization and therefore informed our approaches on how best to attack, thwart and degrade it,” they added.
