Dan Froomkin, who got canned from WAPO throws up a BS waffle ball over at the Huffington Puffington Post.

“Torture apologists are reaching precisely the wrong conclusion from the back-story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, say experienced interrogators and intelligence professionals.

Defenders of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago.

But that sequence of events — even if true — doesn’t demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly.

“I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden,” said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.

It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier — information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, “they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us,” Alexander told The Huffington Post.

“We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information,” he said.”

We don’t know who this anonymous interrogator is, but his opinion is most definitely in the minority of expert opinion. The majority includes much more higher level persons such as two former heads of the CIA, and current head CIA Director Leon Panetta , as well as the FBI, who incidentally have much more informed knowledge of the connected dots and what they led to than some anonymous field interrogator. . The fact is that without the benefit of enhanced interrogation Bin Laden would still be alive.