Torture had absolutely zero to do with finding bin Laden
Shooting down a right-wing media meme before it takes root. Torture had absolutely zero to do with finding Osama bin Laden. It was old-fashioned -- and legal -- intelligence work.
Torture had absolutely zero to do with finding bin Laden
It's time to tear down a myth right now before it spreads.
Torture had absolutely nothing to do with killing Osama bin Laden. Nothing. Zero. Ziilch. Nada. In fact, it was during the era of waterboarding and other "extreme interrogation" methods that we commonly call torture (at least when other nations do it) that the trail for bin Laden grew ice cold. It was in the years that the government changed course and stopped torturing -- beginning with George W. Bush's second term and continuing into the Obama era -- that the hunt for the 9/11 mastermind got back on track: The tools involved were traditional, legal methods of interrogation, improving our human intelligence network in Pakistan, high-technology including wiretapping of foreign terror suspects (not law-abiding American citizens) and satellite surveillance.
Remember, there are two huge arguments why using torture is wrong. The first is, quite simply, is that torture is both illegal -- as marked in the United States both by a history of treating waterboarding as unlawful and under the United Nations Torture Convention signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 -- and immoral.
The second reason -- which comes into play, frankly, because so many people ignore the first reason -- is that torture doesn't even work; frequently, it causes inmates looking to end the painful process to blurt out false and counter-productive information, and many top interrogators say they typically get info by gaining an inmate's trust, not by beating the living daylights out of him.
Over the last three or four years, even as it became clear that a) the waterboarding of captured terrorists like 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and harsh interrogation of other suspects at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere yielded no useful results and b) the use of torture by a nation that had long advertised itself as a beacon of human rights caused serious damage to America's reputation, the architects of the Bush-era torture policy like legal justifier John Yoo and their allies grew even more aggressive in their defense of the practice, seeking in part to make sure they were never punished for their crime.
This week, as news began to dribble out about how bin Laden was found and then killed, torture advocates seized on one particular piece of information. The early information that identified bin Laden's courier who eventually led agents to bin Laden came from Guantanamo inmates, and some of that intel came from the two high-profile inmates including one who was waterboarded: KSM, along with Abu Faraj al-Libi, another al-Qaeda higher-up captured in 2005.
Indeed, the Associated Press rushed out a story that was published in my own newspaper -- the Philadelphia Daily News -- with this headline: "Harsh interrogations led CIA to terrorist's lair"; no doubt the same story ran in many other newspapers with similar headlines (especially since so many papers rely on the AP for national and international news in this age of downsizing).
An early version of the story is bolstered by this quote, referring specifically to "harsh interrogation":
"We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day," said Marty Martin, a retired CIA officer who for years led the hunt for bin Laden.
Not surprisingly, pro-torture politicians, bloggers and activists pounced:
The most prominent of these conservatives was Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who took to Twitterto ask sardonically, "Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now?
Tea Party Express tweeted:
We hope all those who attacked the CIA interrogations of detained terrorists will now apologize and shut up - you were wrong!
The right-wing apologist Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times (Laura Bush's former press secretary) wrote:
The trail to Monday morning's assault on Osama's Pakistan compound began during someone else's presidency. 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.
Of course, former Inquirer op-ed columnist John Yoo who signed off on the torture regimen had to weigh in and gloat:
Imagine what would have happened if the Obama administration had been running things back in 2002-08. It would have given Miranda warnings and lawyers to KSM and other al Qaeda leaders, no Gitmo, no military commissions -- instead civilian trials on US soil with all of the Bill of Rights benefits for terrorist defendants. There would have been no enhanced interrogation program, no terrorist surveillance program, and hence no intelligence mosaic that could have given us the information that produced today's success.
There's just one problem with all this gloating -- it's all complete hogwash. In fact, the information that led to Osama bin Laden did not come during enhanced interrogation, but years later. In fact, the AP -- which had done so much, unfortunately, to spread the initial misinformation -- moved a later version of its story (too late, apparently, for the print readers of the Daily News) that corrected the facts:
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.
Also stepping forward to acknowledge that torture had nothing to do with finding bin Laden was the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein:
Moreover, Feinstein added, nothing about the sequence of events that culminated in Sunday's raid vindicates the Bush-era techniques, nor their use of black sites -- secret prisons, operated by the CIA.
"Absolutely not, I do not," Feinstein said. "I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted, and in my view nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used."
So how they did find bin Laden? Well, as the AP reported in its second try, there wes regular interrogation, which is not only legal but much, much more effective than torture, as both top current agents and the guys who got info from the Nazis back during World War II could have told the Bush administration. By the way, we now know that the "enhanced interrogation" torture regime was over by 2005 when al-Libi was captured, which makes the torture apologists look even sillier.
There were other key factors. The most important -- and let's give credit where it's due; it was indeed launched during Bush's second term -- was an effort to step up the human intelligence network in Pakistan and Afghanistan:
By 2005, many inside the C.I.A. had reached the conclusion that the Bin Laden hunt had grown cold, and the agency’s top clandestine officer ordered an overhaul of the agency’s counterterrorism operations. The result was Operation Cannonball, a bureaucratic reshuffling that 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.
So none of the things that were so rightly criticized during the Bush years -- torture, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens -- had anything to do with finding bin Laden. And there was something else very important: A renewed focus on finding bin Laden by Obama after he became president in January 2009:
Feinstein further claimed that the Obama administration's decision to reconstitute the CIA's bin Laden unit -- which the Bush administration shuttered in 2005 -- was a key factor in the mission's ultimate success. "I think it was very crucial," she said. "I mean this has been there for a substantial period of time. People become experienced with the intelligence."
So the evidence is overwhelming that torture had absolutely zero to do with the killing of Osama bin Laden, but I can assure you that we will continue to hear this fact-free meme in the right-wing media repeatedly in the weeks and months to come. Why? The politicians and the pundits who supported torture created the climate for possibly the most despicable action endorsed by the United States government during my lifetime -- an episode that took the great American experiment in liberty and dragged it into the unthinkable muck of banana-republic-type actions, with nothing to show for it other than a tattered reputation. It's human nature for these folks to want to justify what they said or did, especially when it is morally wrong, and this is the best straw they will ever have to grasp at. But it simply doesn't hold water.
I must repeat myself. Torture is illegal. It is immoral. It only works for fictional characters like Jack Bauer on "24" -- not in real life.
And it didn't find Osama bin Laden.
- Both factoids at issue immediately before "the Left's" taking the White House. Analyze both sides of the issue. Not only will matters you feel passionately about make more sense, but you'll be more inclined to see the merits of the opposition, thus setting the groundwork for compromise.
— evolutionary - Just when I thought Will could not get more partisan, he writes something like this. Will...how do you know anything about this? What gives you more knowledge and insight, and what makes you more privy to the "inside" stuff than the various intelligence folks, aides, department heads, etc.? Amazing! When you write this kind of blind, biased, drivel you lose ALL credibility. Oooops! My error. You lost that a long time ago.— bartfr
- The best part is that the nutjobs are thanking Cheney, while Cheney is busy thanking the President. Don't you all look so petty?— HandNik
Comment removed.- If I was an employer and I knew I had an employee with such deranged thoughts, I would try to get them some help at a place with padded walls. Will - start taking your medication.— vh1
- Why does no one ever mention that the USA created and supported Bin Laden under Reagan? The Fox News clowns and their ignorant sheep just cannot fathom or accept that our black president made a gutsy call and commanded the military to capture the most wanted man on earth. Tea Party Racists need to take their meds and give our president respect.— Barry O
- Leftwing clowns like Barry O just cannot fathom or accept that George W. Bush's leadership and policies got the initial intelligence that allowed our black president to make a gutsy call and kill (Not capture, Barry O) the most wanted man on earth. Barry O, you need to take your meds and give President George W. Bush respect.
P.S. You are a racist. - Define "no one". I think plenty of media outlets have mentioned his American support, and the great irony of him becoming our Number 1 antagonist. Everyone knows this, it's one of the reasons for Muslim anger at his killing.
Fox News may be right-leaning, but to say their critique is because Obama is black is just lazy. Fox News is designed to appeal to the Right Wing base - not the Left Wing, and certainly not Moderates (though I admit they give airtime to far Left views, I do not feel that is effective in promulgating productive discourse). With that in mind, you cannot say that they would have been any more restrained or effusive with their praise had John Kerry, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, etc. been in the Oval Office right now, and not Obama.
I do agree Right Wingers (as should Lefties) need to gravitate towards the center and offer praise for this National Triumph, regardless of percentages of "credit" they wish to issue.— evolutionary - Like your opinion is a surprise to anyone who has suffered through one, or more likely the first paragraph, of any of your columns. The true news would have been if you had accepted that enhanced interrogation techniques were effective in obtaining actionable intelligence— melbill6294
- Certainly true actionable intel could have come from waterboarding, and to believe otherwise is silly on his part. That doesn't in fact disprove (or prove) his point that "better" or more consistent intel comes from standard procedure.
Better question to you is: why do you subject yourself to such an obviously (and apparently foreseeably) unpleasant experience?— evolutionary - Comment removed.
- The Left in this country sought defeat for America in the War on Terror...I find it interesting that they choose this time to gloat. Had it not been for policies already put in place by the Bush administration, this sorry group would not have known whether to s#@% or wind their watches.— Nicher
- You know deep down the Left doesn't want that. Shame on you for propagating that. You're part of the problem. — evolutionary
- So sad to see the right wingers scrambling again to protect a lie. The facts clearly show this was not the result of waterboarding or secret prisons. And treating terrorists as criminals was what actually got this done. It was dropping bombs or drones with missiles, it was old fashioned police work. Investigators following leads, a high-end SWAT team making the bust.— Mr. Baseball
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