Indeed, one former senior Air Force interrogator from the Iraq war, who has written two books under the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, told the Daily News last night he believes that the waterboarding of top bin Laden aides in the early 2000s may have actually slowed down the search by a couple of years.
Alexander — author of the recent Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious al Qaeda Terrorist — said that waterboarding bin Laden aide Khalid Sheikh Mohammed phony leads about the terrorist’s courier, and a second al-Qaeda higher-up gave agents a fake name. “That led to the CIA wasting time and resources,” he said.
Of course. And, to my knowledge, no intelligence officials have spoken up publicly and said that waterboarding or harsh interrogation methods actually yielded any serious information about Bin Laden or anything else.