The New York Times delves deeply into the question of the role played by torture in developing intelligence that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Not much, it would appear. Some of those tortured the most were the most misleading about what they revealed.

“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,” said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council. “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.”

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