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 But the U.S. Senate report on CIA interrogation methods released
this week suggests that more mundane steps - email monitoring, a tip
off from a CIA source and help from Thailand - may have been what
brought down Hambali, head of militant group Jemaah Islamiah.
"Frankly, we stumbled onto Hambali," the report quoted the head of
the Central Intelligence Agency's counterterrorism center in
southeast Asia as saying in 2005.
Conflicting stories about the trail of clues that led investigators
to Hambali illustrate one of the main disputes over the U.S.
interrogation of terror suspects: Awful as it was, did it actually
work?
Senior CIA officials told Congress, the White House and the Justice
Department for years that a snippet of information from the brutal
interrogation of senior al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
led to Hambali's capture.
 Accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United
States, Mohammed was repeatedly subjected to some of the CIA's
harshest methods after he was captured. He was waterboarded - a
technique intended to simulate drowning - 183 times, and was
slapped, grabbed and deprived of sleep, according to the Senate
report.
Mohammed told CIA interrogators in early 2003 about a plan to have a
former resident of Baltimore, Majid Khan, send $50,000 to southeast
Asia to fund al Qaeda attacks.
The spy agency says that information helped investigators uncover a
network of terror suspects in southeast Asia that led to Hambali
himself. Hambali, also known as Riduan Isamuddin, was detained in
Ayutthaya, Thailand, in 2003.
Described by former President George W. Bush as "one of the world's
most lethal terrorists," Hambali is suspected of having been
involved in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks and the bombing of a
nightclub in Bali that killed more than 200 people. He has been held
at the Guantanamo U.S. military prison in Cuba without trial since
2006.
TORTURE PLAYED "NO ROLE"
Although the CIA frequently presented the capture of Hambali as
evidence that torture did produce valuable intelligence, the Senate
report said that the harsh treatment of Mohammed, known as KSM, did
not help catch Hambali.
In 2003, Hambali was among Asia's most wanted men. The main
go-between for the Jemaah Islamiah group of Southeast Asia and Osama
bin Laden's al Qaeda, Hambali was considered the only man from the
region to win a place at al Qaeda's top table.
His capture was seen as a coup for the Bush administration and
Southeast Asian governments fearful of Jemaah Islamiah's ability to
launch attacks across the region.
The CIA gave "inaccurate representations regarding the capture of
Hambali" in 18 documents sent to policymakers and the Department of
Justice between 2003 and 2009, said the report, compiled by the
Democratic majority on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"A review of CIA operational cables and other records found that
information obtained from KSM during and after the use of the CIA's
enhanced interrogation techniques played no role in the capture of
Hambali," the report said.
Before Mohammed gave up information about Khan during interrogation,
the CIA was already assembling leads that would eventually bring it
and Thai investigators to Hambali, the report said.
Some clues came from monitoring emails between al Qaeda and Khan,
who was later captured in Pakistan. He gave Pakistani investigators
details about al Qaeda's links to Southeast Asia that eventually
pointed to Hambali, the report said.
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In contrast to the CIA's use of torture, Pakistani interrogators
pried information from Khan with a soft questioning technique known
as "rapport building," the report said. A CIA source contributed
to the capture of Hambali by identifying an associate of Khan in
Thailand who gave information to Thai authorities that brought them
closer to the Indonesian militant, the Senate document said.
After Hambali's capture, Thailand also claimed credit.
"We received tipoffs from local people that there were
strange-looking people staying around there so we checked their
background and passports and realized that they were the people we
were looking for," then Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said
in 2003.
Former intelligence officials disputed the Senate committee's
assertions that the CIA interrogation program played no role in the
hunt for Hambali.
"The report errs in not recognizing that a piece of information can
be useful and even critical to reaching an analytic conclusion, even
if there also are other pieces of information that were at least as
useful," said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst.
 They said the United States never would have tracked down and killed
bin Laden in 2011 without information acquired in the interrogation
program, although the Senate committee strongly refutes that. The committee said the CIA misrepresented how it got useful
information from a detainee that helped locate bin Laden.
The terror suspect, Hassan Ghul, did tell his captors the name of
Bin Laden’s courier as the CIA reported but he did so before
undergoing torture, not during it, the report saidHambali, the
nom-de-guerre of Indonesian-born Riduan Isamuddin, was believed to
be in the process of organizing a follow-up to the Sept. 11 attacks,
possibly involving airplanes, but this time directed at the West
Coast of the United States, former CIA officials say.
Michael Hayden, the ex-director of the CIA, told Fox News on
Wednesday that the agency is still using information gleaned from
harsh interrogations, which have since been banned.
"These interrogations of all the detainees gave us kind of a Home
Depot-like storage of information on al Qaeda on which we relied,
well we are still relying on it today."
(Editing by John Pickering, Jason Szep and Lisa Shumaker)
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Did
torture really help U.S. find al Qaeda chief Hambali?
