Ace has a great post up which illustrates a possible timeline on the stages that led up to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Some of it is speculative, but all of it is based on the known details at this time. I’m sure some of the details will change as they are corrected over time, but it’s a good place to start and seem the best we can do at reconstructing what happened over the years to get us to this point.
Let me point you to his main argument which was that the three people who led us to the courier who would eventually give away bin Laden’s position were all tortured to get that information.
I used torture here intentionally because that is what the Left has chosen to call the enhanced interrogation techniques which gave us this information. During the debates over waterboarding, the Left had two basic arguments: 1) Torture doesn’t work; 2) even if it did, no information gleaned would be worth the moral price paid.
As Ace shows, all three of those who gave up the courier were, in fact, tortured. And the one he forgets to mention, Abu Faraj al-Libbi? He was tortured too!
Of these four, it is only Hassan Ghul that we don’t know for sure what techniques were used to extract information. But, again as Ace points out, Ghul was interrogated in Pakistan. A place not know for serving tea and crumpets just before conjugal visits.
So, clearly, torture works.
The problem with statistical and anecdotal evidence showing torture doesn’t work (and I’ve seen this evidence) is that all of these data were collected from tin pot dictatorships, third world countries, or the middle ages. In other words, the people who didn’t know what they were doing are the ones held out as evidence that torture doesn’t work. Which is exactly what you’d expect to find.
It’s not that torture never works, it’s that usually torture is done so badly that it doesn’t work. Our guys? These guys know how to do it.
If the latter argument is true, that the price just wasn’t worth paying because it somehow makes us all complicit in a crime so the outcome is irrelevant, then why would any one on the Left be celebrating bin Laden’s death? Instead, shouldn’t they be mourning the fact that people were, you know, tortured?
Ace has a great post up which illustrates a 
The real question to me is using the Obama doctrine for prisoners to have full rights, didn’t Kahlid say that he wanted a lawyer out of the box with his first statement? If so, and with Obama, everything would have stopped until an attorney was appointed. If at that time, based on advice of attorney, the terrorist prisoner told them to piss up a rope, Obama would have left them alone and gained zero information. So some think that his saying no torture (waterboarding is not torture, battery cables to testicles is torture) would still have yielded something with standard interrogation techniques as applied to citizens arrested in the USA. Not sure how that works if the client lawyered up speaks only through his attorney… Can someone enlighten me on this? I have to be missing something.
Some has stated that the real intel came not during the waterboarding, but much later. If they waterboarded me and I was still in Gitmo a few months and they asked questions, wouldn’t I be wondering if I do not answer them if they will waterboard me again? Seems like an interrogater might want to use that threat, even if he knows it will not happen, the terrorist might not be so sure..