Archive for the ‘Osama bin Laden’ Category

U.S. Sen. John McCain, perhaps the only member of Congress who understands torture as something other than a State of the Union address, tackles the topic today in a Washington Post op-ed.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz./Associated Press

McCain declared as “false” contentions that intelligence leading to the death of Osama bin Laden came through techniques such as waterboarding:

”I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.

“The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured.

“None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his …

Continue reading John McCain: ‘Torture didn’t lead us to Osama bin Laden’ »

The New Yorker magazine has settled the question of whether Osama bin Laden has ever visited the United States:

Osama was here for two weeks in 1979, it seems, and he visited Indiana and Los Angeles, among other places. He had a favorable encounter with an American medical doctor; he also reportedly met in Los Angeles with his spiritual mentor of the time, the Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam.

All this is according to a forthcoming book by Osama’s first wife, Najwa Bin Laden, and his son Omar Bin Laden, to be published in the autumn by St. Martin’s Press.

Writes Osama’s wife:

I remember few details of our travel, other than we passed through London before flying to a place I had never heard of, a state in America called Indiana….

I came to believe that Americans were gentle and nice, people easy to deal with. As far as the country itself goes, my husband and I did not hate America, yet we did not love it.

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