Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse on Sunday said that a report chronicling Central Intelligence Agency extreme interrogation techniques proved that such methods did not aid U.S. efforts to find and kill Osama bin Laden.
“If you look at the information we had on the courier that took us to Osama bin Laden, we had four sources on that, and those four sources all provided all the information the CIA needed to know to track this guy before they were exposed to enhanced information techniques or never having been exposed to those techniques,” the junior Rhode Island senator, a Democrat, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Whitehouse debated the merits of the so-called torture report with Karl Rove, former senior adviser to President George W. Bush.
Rove countered that Whitehouse’s claims about the extreme interrogations being irrelevant in finding bin Laden were “simply not true.”
“That is not what three directors of the CIA say,” Rove added.
In a rare press conference, CIA Director John Brennan last week insisted that the techniques in question helped protect the homeland, even if they were occasionally abused.
President Obama has declined to take sides in the debate between Senate Democrats and the CIA over whether extreme interrogations produced meaningful intelligence.
