Will Senate’s Anti-Torture Report Be Used to Bolster NSA Snooping Defenses?

Sources have told the
Associated Press (watch out for another round of phone
record-snatching, guys!) that the Senate Intelligence Committee
report at the center of a fight between the committee and the CIA
confirms what many observers knew or suspected: Waterboarding and
harsh interrogation techniques did not provide any useful
information to catch Osama bin Laden. In every case where the CIA
used torture and claimed it helped, there were
other explanations as to where they got the
information. 

The most high-profile detainee linked to the bin Laden
investigation was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom the CIA waterboarded
183 times. Mohammed, intelligence officials have noted, confirmed
after his 2003 capture that he knew an important al-Qaeda courier
with the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.

But the report concludes that such information wasn’t critical,
according to the aides. Mohammed only discussed al-Kuwaiti months
after being waterboarded, while he was under standard
interrogation, they said. And Mohammed neither acknowledged
al-Kuwaiti’s significance nor provided interrogators with the
courier’s real name.

The debate over how investigators put the pieces together is
significant because years later, the courier led U.S. intelligence
to the sleepy Pakistani military town of Abbottabad. There, Navy
SEALs killed bin Laden in a secret mission.

The creation of this report, still classified (though at this
point the contents are probably one of the
worst-kept secrets in D.C.), prompted a squabble between the
CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over access to an
internal CIA report that allegedly came to the same conclusion. The
conflict caused Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to
take an unusual stand, at least for her: She came out against
government surveillance. Or rather, she came out against government
surveillance of Senate staffers. The CIA has reportedly snooped in
Senate Intelligence Committee computers to try to determine how
staffers got access to this internal report (Feinstein claims the
CIA itself provided access to the report).

The real lesson of the report, though, is that we all have
foreign surveillance and the National Security Agency (NSA) to
thank for helping get to bin Laden:

Without providing full details, aides said the Senate report
illustrates the importance of the National Security Agency’s
efforts overseas. Intelligence officials have previously described
how in the years, when the CIA couldn’t find where bin Laden’s
courier was, NSA eavesdroppers came up with nothing until 2010 –
when Ahmed had a telephone conversation with someone monitored by
U.S. intelligence.

At that point, U.S. intelligence was able to follow Ahmed to bin
Laden’s hideout.

So we need to keep an eye out for the inevitable straw man
arguments about the NSA’s metadata collection efforts. The
objection has always been to the mass collection of the phone
records of millions upon millions of innocent Americans. It is not
an argument that the NSA shouldn’t be attempting to track suspected
foreign terrorists overseas. It’s easy, though, to see how this
report, once declassified, could be used to defend any form of NSA
surveillance.