(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Did the use of torture help prevent a second 9/11-style attack on London's Heathrow Airport? For years, the CIA claimed it did.
But a scathing US Senate report flatly contradicts the agency's version of events, emphatically discrediting torture as an effective weapon in counter-terrorism.
A day after publication of the report, debate raged about whether information gleaned from "enhanced interrogation techniques" had ever foiled an attack or led to the capture of an Al Qaeda operatives.
The sharp divide even appeared to wrongfoot the White House, with a spokesman refusing to say whether or not President Barack Obama believed torture had yielded worthwhile intelligence.
The Senate Committee report sought to demolish the CIA's stance that torture had provided useful intelligence, examining and picking apart in painstaking detail several specific agency claims made through the years, relating to the discovery of Osama Bin Laden's hideout, a planned attack on US skyscrapers and a suicide attack against a US base in Djibouti. Torture saved lives, argue supporters of the CIA, along with several senior officials from the era of former president George W Bush who broke cover to defend the programme.
One of the most regularly cited CIA "success stories" was thwarting a planned September 11-style attack on Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf in London, a brainchild of self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But the US Senate report debunked that claim, accusing the CIA of misrepresenting the truth.
"A review of CIA operational cables and other documents found that contrary to CIA representations, information acquired during or after the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques played no role in 'alert[ing]' the CIA to the threat to-'disrupt[ing]' the plotting against-Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf," the report concluded.
The CIA contended that one of the key planners of the attack, Ramzi Binalshibh, was captured thanks to information gleaned during the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was reportedly waterboarded. However the Senate report found Binalshibh was already known to the CIA and was in fact captured by chance during a raid by Pakistani forces searching for another individual.
Moreover, the CIA was also already aware of Heathrow being a target for Al Qaeda, and knew the terror network had been unable to find pilots for the plot "and the planned attack was not imminent."
The CIA acknowledges interrogations were not always effective, but argues they generally produced results. Zubaydah's interrogation produced information that fed into 766 intelligence reports.
Republicans meanwhile insist that without using torture, the CIA would never have fully understood the significance of the courier whose identification ultimately led to the discovery of Bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. The Senate report however says this claim is exaggerated, and that numerous other sources had already pointed towards the courier.
Supporters and critics of the CIA program continue to lock horns over cases that are more than 10 years old. But one fact is not in dispute: that under torture, many detainees invented intelligence that sent the CIA down several blind alleys.
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