Freedom Rider:
First Casualty of War
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
All that is certain, is that you should never believe anything the U.S. government tells you –and certainly not the second and third versions of the event. The depths of official U.S. duplicity (triplicity?) are so staggering, they may never be plumbed. “We do know that people were assassinated in a planned execution and there was never any intent of putting them on trial as civilized nations usually do.”
“Now that bin Laden is dead we have the American passion for bloodlust on full display.”
The past month has been a difficult one for anyone who wants to be at all knowledgeable about our world. First it was necessary to avoid the endless and endlessly useless reporting of the British royal wedding. No sooner had that media monstrosity ended when we were told that the United States government had succeeded in killing Osama bin Laden. The orgy of hatred and rancid triumphalism was immediate and a sickening sight to behold. Crowds of rabid Americans descended upon “ground zero” the world trade center site, to wave flags and chant as if they were the winning football team.
While the savagery was on full display, so were the lies. The version of events kept changing as the week went on. First we were told that bin Laden resisted and was shot as a result of that resistance. Then he was using a woman as a shield. Both claims were then refuted. First, his safe house was worth $1 million dollars and he was “living high on the hog.” Now it turns out that the home was worth approximately $250,000 and was shabby and dirty, a bit like a home on a reality show about hoarders.
Mansion or hoarded home? Fighter or hiding behind his wife’s skirt? We will never know. We do know that all the inhabitants of the house were not captured. It turns out that because a navy SEAL helicopter broke down it prevented the commandos from capturing bin Laden’s wife and daughter and other occupants. The Pakistanis have them in protective custody and so far refuse to allow the Americans to interrogate them.
“The version of events kept changing as the week went on.”
We don’t know what is true. We don’t know if the president and his team, as first reported, watched the entire attack in real time, or if what CIA director Leon Panetta now says is true. “I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes that we really didn't know just exactly what was going on.” We do know that people were assassinated in a planned execution and there was never any intent of putting them on trial as civilized nations usually do.
The killing has exposed the dark underbelly of American society. The outside group, in this case Muslims, are supposed to disassociate themselves from their members, proclaiming loudly that they are glad bin Laden is dead and they can prove their loyalty. Of course, Christians and Jews don’t have to proclaim denunciation of the occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya which were planned by their co-religionists.
This ugliness has been put on hold for the last ten years. Bin Laden was a specter used to justify unspeakable acts but he was still just a specter. Now that he is dead we have the American passion for bloodlust on full display.
Having succeeded where Bush failed, Obama strutted his way into New York City, meeting firefighters and other deified first responders making the case for more death. The corporate media keep up their dirty work with bizarre and ludicrous portrayals of the SEAL team. Newsweek calls them “the coolest guys in the world” who are the “America’s quietest killers.” The New York Times calls them “elite of the elite” and “all-stars.”
“Bin Laden was a specter used to justify unspeakable acts but he was still just a specter.”
There is no longer any pretense of a civilized nation run by civilian authority.
We were treated to an ordinary photo of the president and his staff but it was immediately dubbed “iconic.” Hillary Clinton felt compelled to claim that allergies caused her to show some emotion upon seeing the video or photos or whatever it is she actually saw. Her decision to tell a strange tale was unnecessary and a reminder of why she, a bad liar unlike Obama, is secretary of state and not president.
So now we have years of the Obama the conqueror theme to watch and hopefully not be nauseated by. The disarray of the Republican party made his re-election probable and now he is the bin Laden killer. His only disappointment is that he didn’t succeed in killing Muammar Gaddafi that same weekend. Well, even a Teflon president can’t always win.
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.com.
The Big Lie:
Torture Got Bin Laden
Dave Weigel predicts Republican spin:
Expect to hear more about this report that the information that led to the tailing of bin Laden's courier, and eventually to his death, was acquired in interrogations that Obama ended once he took office. It may not be Republican candidates pointing this out. They don't need to. George W. Bush has a considerable amen chorus in the press, with former staffers like Marc Thiessen, Michael Gerson, and John Yoo writing regular columns about how the 43rd president was right.
Predict it? It's already become a meme. Last night, O'Reilly simply said "What about the waterboarding?" before moving on to other issues. A military reader writes how Fox is leading with the torture lie:
Driving right now - flipped on Fox News Channel out of curiosity on Sirius. Since 07h30, they have been openly encouraging waterboarding and have at least 6 times that I've noticed said that the reason we got OBL is directly attributable to what had been revealed during waterboarding sessions. I am, in two words, fucking disgusted.
Here's Andrew Malcolm:
That previous president authorized enhanced interrogation techniques which convinced folks like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to give up, among many other things, the name of their top-secret courier, now deceased.
Leave aside the horrifying fact that Republicans, seeking to score some ownership of this triumph, would look to torture as their contribution. Why not the beefed up on-the-ground intelligence from 2005 on? That's Bush's legacy that Obama built on. Besides, there is no evidence that it played any part whatsoever. From the NYT:
Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.
My italics. So in torturing these two men, interrogators got nothing of substance. In fact, it was only by assuming that these men were lying under torture that the investigation continued. It was subsequently, during normal interrogations that KSM gave us a central clue:
Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.
To repeat: in the one instance we now clearly know about, the CIA is telling us that torture gave them lies. Which they were. Only when traditional interrogation was used did we get the actual names of the couriers. Marcy Wheeler looks at the current data set:
We can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.
Follow up here. Jane Mayer's thoughts. Brian Beutler focuses on the flaws in the AP story torture apologists latched onto. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld himself has denied that torture played any role in finding bin Laden:
“It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.”
What really broke the case? From the NYT:
Operation Cannonball, a [2005] bureaucratic reshuffling ... placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name. Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar.
Old-fashioned, painstaking, labor-intensive intelligence work. The American way. We never needed to stoop to bin Laden's standards to get bin Laden. We needed merely to follow our long-tested humane procedures.
(Photo: Newspapers left by visitors grace the fence overlooking the crash site of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on May 2, 2011 following the announcement that Osama Bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan. Nearly 10 years after September 11, 2001, construction is underway to erect a formal memorial at the crash site. By Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
When I was a defense attorney in the Office of Military Commissions in Guantanamo, President Obama issued an executive order on interrogation policy that ended the CIA’s secret detention program and required that all US interrogators comply with the Army Field Manual. He also ordered the closure of Guantanamo within one year.
A detainee is escorted by guards in a facility at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base on March 30, 2010. (Photo: Brennan Linsley / AP Photo)After the order was issued, I taped it to my office door and highlighted the portion that said, “the detention facilities at Guantanamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” I truly believed the U.S. had closed the door on abusive detention and interrogation forever.
This week, following mixed reports that information obtained from detainees held in those secret prisons may have been used in the years-long process to locate Osama bin Laden, torture apologists have seized on this information to call for the reopening of the CIA prisons and reauthorization of "enhanced interrogation techniques"–a euphemism for torture and other ill-treatment. Their primary argument has been simply that torture works.
Whether torture can produce some truthful information has never been the right question. It can. But even if the victim of torture does provide some accurate information, there is no way to sift the truth from lies produced as the detainee merely tries to get interrogators to stop. There’s no way to know which lead is worth pursuing–risking human life and limited resources – and which should be disregarded. And by resorting to torture, experienced interrogators report, less truthful information can be produced than if traditional, lawful techniques were used. Results also come more slowly because detainees buckle down and resist. Former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who interrogated Abu Zubaydah among others, testified before Congress that the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques “are ineffective, slow, and unreliable, and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda.”
National security is diminished by the false leads torture can produce, and devastating consequences may ensue. When Ibn Sheikh al Libi was tortured while in CIA custody, he claimed a link to Iraq and weapons of mass destruction that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell used in his speech to the United Nations to justify the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Of course, as we now know, that information was utterly false.
Each time the U.S. has strayed from core values there have been national security consequences.
By contrast, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was arrested for the attempted Christmas bombing of a U.S. airliner bound for Detroit, he provided intelligence to the FBI immediately upon his apprehension, despite being interrogated in a purportedly lawful manner. He continued to do so after he was charged. The Department of Justice has touted the significant intelligence obtained from L’Houssaine Kherchtou, an early member of al Qaeda. He has not only provided valuable information, but hastestified in the trials of numerous terrorism suspects, including that of Ahmed Ghailani, a Tanzanian convicted of conspiracy in U.S. federal court in November 2010 and now serving life in prison for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa. Many others have provided and continue to provide information to U.S. authorities used in preventing terrorist attacks and prosecuting terrorism suspects, without the use of coercive interrogation techniques.
While the killing of Osama bin Laden may help protect the U.S. from terrorism, as much or more credit should go to the Obama administration’s decision to shut down the Bush-era CIA interrogation program. Under this secret program, the details of which are still not fully disclosed, the U.S. abandoned the rule of law and embraced a system of detention and interrogation that was not only illegal and immoral, but severely damaged U.S. national security.
In fact, each time the U.S. has strayed from core values there have been national security consequences. Senior military officials report that foreign fighters joined the war in Iraq following the release of the Abu Ghraib abuse photos, and the continued existence of Guantanamo has been used as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda. Earlier this year when a detainee died at Guantanamo of apparently natural causes, the fact that it happened at Guantanamo made it a major focal point for anti-U.S. and militant propaganda. The Taliban issued a statement condemning the U.S. for violating international law and thousands attended his funeral in Afghanistan.
We will never know how much information the U.S. lost because it failed to use time-tested, effective, and humane methods of interrogation. We will never know how many years earlier bin Laden could have been captured and how many lives spared if, instead of whisking them off to a prison outside the law, the U.S. had instead charged Mohammed and al Libi in federal courts and treated them properly and in accordance with due process. We do know that bin Laden’s death does not end the threat terrorists pose to the U.S. and other nations. But we also know that the best way to guard against future attack is by rejecting the use of torture outright and staying faithful to the rule of law and basic tenets of decency. This is true not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it works.
Andrea J. Prasow is senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch.
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