Just three of the 789 detainees sent to the Guantanamo Bay detention center after the 9/11 attacks were waterboarded, retiring Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss said Sunday.
The process netted hundreds of "actionable intelligence reports," he said, insisting the practices the CIA used there and elsewhere saved American lives and weakened al-Qaida.
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Chambliss, who was the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CBS "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer that he has been watching intelligence that's come from the CIA's interrogation program since it started in 2002, and the torture of captive Abu Zubaydah was what identified and led to the capture of 9-11 attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
"There were 766 actionable intelligence reports written from Abu Zubaydah," Chambliss commented. "Once he broke, then he was just a treasure trove of information."
In addition, with respect to the CIA, "we all know exactly where we were on the morning of Sept. 11," said Chambliss."[Abu Zubaydah] and two [other] of the individuals subjected to waterboarding were the masterminds of 9/11. They are the ones who told those 9/11 hijackers, take those box cutters, go slit the throats of airline pilots and take over the airliners, fly those airplanes into buildings, they did it, they killed Americans."
And Americans were "in mourning and scared to death that something else like this might happen again," said Chambliss. And before waterboarding was terminated in 2003, it had been applied to just three people "but they were the masterminds of this," he said. "A treasure trove from all three of them."
The CIA has made changes in its procedures, Chambliss said, but what they did before was done under the color of law, and the Department of Justice ruled there were no crimes committed, and in fact were legal.
The agency also ran into problems this past summer when it became known agents had hacked the computers of investigators on the intelligence committee, but Chambliss said he does not believe the Senate issued its damaging report in retribution.
"I think long before we found out about what the CIA had done relative to the Senate side of the computers...there was a determination by the leadership on the Intel committee and by Democratic members that this report needed to be made public," Chambliss said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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