„Funny. You would think that if the C.I.A.’s interrogation of high-value detainees was all it took, the U.S. government would have succeeded in locating bin Laden before 2006, which is when the C.I.A.’s custody of so-called high-value detainees ended. Instead, after the Supreme Court ruled that year that prisoners needed to be treated humanely in compliance with the Geneva Conventions, the C.I.A. was forced to turn its special detainees over to the military for detention and interrogation using more lawful tactics in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It took five more years before all the dots could be adequately connected.
Many key details are still missing. But according to the New York Times, the turning point came when detainees being held in Guantánamo—not in the C.I.A.’s secret black-site prisons—revealed to American interrogators the pseudonym used by a key bin Laden courier, who they also identified as a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Then, four years ago, American interrogators were able to learn the real name of the courier. It then took two more years, according to the Times, before American officials were able to piece together the geographic region in which he operated. They didn’t succeed in tracking him to the suspicious compound, in which bin Laden resided, until last August.