The harsh techniques were authorized under the Bush administration and championed over the last decade by several Bush officials as crucial tools in the effort to thwart terror plots and ultimately defeat Islamic extremism. But most human-rights lawyers call them illegal, and although President Obama has adopted some aspects of his predecessors policies on the war on terror, he has denounced the use of such techniques as ineffective and "a recruitment tool for terrorists."
The debate over interrogations has largely faded from the news over the last year or two, but since the announcement of bin Laden's killing Sunday night, it has re-emerged. Conservative supporters of such techniques argue that the bin Laden operation proves they are effective. "I would assume that the enhanced interrogation program that we put in place produced some of the results that led to bin Laden's ultimate capture," former Vice President Dick Cheney said on Fox News Monday.
Liberal opponents counter that it proves no such thing. "To the best of our knowledge, based on a look, none of [the information that led to bin Laden] came as a result of harsh interrogation practices," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, said the same day.
But the publicly available facts paint a far grayer picture. There's little concrete evidence that enhanced techniques were crucial in producing information that uncovered bin Laden's whereabouts. But it's not impossible that they played a role....'
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