Rep. Peter King: Initial Information on Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti Was Obtained by Waterboarding in 2003

The debate continues today.

My previous post indicated that waterboarding put intelligence officials "on the trail" of Abu Ahmad. No doubt my ace commenter James B. SpongeBob has some questions for Representative Peter King, and of course J.B. SpongeBob didn't provide all the information on Donald Rumsfeld's comments, for example, speaking on The Today Show yesterday, Rumsfeld that the intelligence on Bin Laden may well "have come from interviews at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

And Matt Lewis quotes Karl Rove from his appearance on Fox & Friends yesterday:

Look, there is continuity in these kind of things and the tools that President Bush put into place, GITMO, rendition, enhanced interrogation, the vast effort to collect and collate this information, put it in a usable form obviously served his successor quite well because this served the information of the courier several years ago and moved forward to this administration.

And Thomas Joscelyn's leaning that way as well, "Did Enhanced Interrogation of the 20th Hijacker Help Identify Bin Laden’s Courier?"

And John Yoo yesterday, "Bush-Obama Continuity Is the Key to Terror War Victories":

Anonymous government sources say that the al Qaeda courier who led our intelligence people to bin Laden was a protege of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks who was captured in 2002, subjected to enhanced interrogation methods, and yielded a trove of intelligence on al Qaeda. Those same sources admit that interrogation of al Qaeda leaders, presumably by the CIA, yielded the identity of the courier. That identity was then combined into a mosaic of other information from other detainee interrogations, electronic intercepts, and sources in other countries, to eventually identify bin Laden’s hideout.

And here's this at The Atlantic, "Rethinking Guantanamo After Detainee Info Led to Bin Laden." Can't block quote that one without decontextualizing it, although it's noted that conflicting reports "are being used to support arguments in both directions."

There's a big report on Abu Ahmad at Telegraph UK. It's Hassan Ghul who gave up the Ahmad's name, but again, would that have been possible without the earlier intelligence from harsh interrogations?

More later.