The Waterboarding Trail to bin Laden
Former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey furnishes more context to the interrogation technique that ultimately helped Obama claim his greatest success as president.
(WSJ Opinion) — Osama bin Laden was killed by Americans, based on intelligence developed by Americans. That should bring great satisfaction to our citizens and elicit praise for our intelligence community. Seized along with bin Laden’s corpse was a trove of documents and electronic devices that should yield intelligence that could help us capture or kill other terrorists and further degrade the capabilities of those who remain at large.
But policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we’ll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden. The administration also hounds our intelligence gatherers in ways that can only demoralize them.
Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information — including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.
That regimen of harsh interrogation was used on KSM after another detainee, Abu Zubaydeh, was subjected to the same techniques. When he broke, he said that he and other members of al Qaeda were obligated to resist only until they could no longer do so, at which point it became permissible for them to yield. “Do this for all the brothers,” he advised his interrogators.
Abu Zubaydeh was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of 9/11. Bin al Shibh disclosed information that, when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydeh, helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the United States.
Another of those gathered up later in this harvest, Abu Faraj al-Libi, also was subjected to certain of these harsh techniques and disclosed further details about bin Laden’s couriers that helped in last weekend’s achievement.
The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. Regrettably, that same administration gave them a name — “enhanced interrogation techniques” — so absurdly antiseptic as to imply that it must conceal something unlawful.
The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It’s available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.
HT: Althouse
Posted by WM on Friday, May 6, 2011, at 10:38 am | 
Tweet
According to Mark Theisen, Obama shut down all interrogation of prisoners on his second day in office.
That means that ANY intelligence gained through interrogation that was used to kill Bin Laden was collected under the orders of the last administration.
So what critical role did Obama play in this mission?
.
KLM gave us the tip that we needed. He didn’t give us an actual name of the courier because he didn’t know it. UBF compartmentalized his info on his org and activities…and trusted only a small group. That’s wy it took so long to find his ass. Well that and the NY Slimes publishing insider info as to how we were tracking UBF early on in the war. Trusting the ISI and Musharaff didn’t help none either.
Despite all that, the processes and people were in place for ten years, working tirelessly on tracking down Satan’s bus boy.
W’s efforts can be compared to a good GM who puts together a good football team. The GM gets fired or resigns over differences with the owner and the next GM and coach come along and win a Superbowl. Who gets the credit, the wise former GM or the new coach? Its like Barry Switzer taking over for Jimmy Johnson.
osama died in 2001 of renal failure, the world is laughing at all the morons in the usa who believe obama’s and the cia’s (aka al-quedea) bullshit. they killed some people on may 2nd but not osama, thats why the released photos of the muslims they shot in that house but no bin laden you fools
Shut up about “the (treasure) trove” of information! These incompetent assholes go out and tell the world via the press exactly what was gathered from OLB’s hellhole. The jackwads in the WH and the surrounding fools that are releasing this info need to just shut up! It would be far better off to report that “not much or very little useful information was gathered”. BUT NOOOOOOO! They have to run around telling the world so AL-ISLAMI TV can broadcast it and push teh radicals further into hiding!
the hypocrite in chief obama has destroyed most of our effective interogation capability yet the commie rat bastard tries to take credit for the killing of his muslim brother osama bin laden.
Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym) is a former senior military interrogator who conducted or supervised over 1,300 interrogations in Iraq, leading to the capture of numerous al-Qaeda leaders. In the interview, he goes through the information we already know that demonstrates that we got no actionable information on bin Laden from torture. From the rush transcript:
One of the things that people aren’t talking about is the fact that one of the people that was confronted with this information that bin Laden had a courier is Skaykh al-Libi, who was held in a CIA secret prison and was tortured and who gave his CIA interrogators the name of the courier as being Maulawi Jan. And the CIA chased down that information and found out that person didn’t exist, that al-Libi had lied. And nobody is talking about the fact that al-Libi caused us to waste resources and time by chasing a false lead because he was tortured.
The other thing that’s being left out of this conversation is the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed certainly knew the real name of the courier, whose nom de guerre or nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had to have known his real name or at least how to find him, a location that we might look, but he never gave up that information. And so, what we’re seeing is that waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques, just like professional interrogators have been saying for years, always result in either limited information, false information or no information.
He also addresses the losing argument that torture works:
My argument is pretty simple, Amy. I don’t torture because it doesn’t work. I don’t torture, because it’s immoral, and it’s against the law, and it’s inconsistent with my oath of office, in which I swore to defend the Constitution of the United States. And it’s also inconsistent with American principles. So, my primary argument against torture is one of morality, not one of efficacy.
You know, if torture did work and we could say it worked 100 percent of the time, I still wouldn’t use it. The U.S. Army Infantry, when it goes out into battle and it faces resistance, it doesn’t come back and ask for the permission to use chemical weapons. I mean, chemical weapons are extremely effective—we could say almost 100 percent effective. And yet, we don’t use them. But we make this—carve out this special space for interrogators and say that, well, they’re different, so they can violate the laws of war if they face obstacles.
And that’s an insult to American interrogators, who are more than capable of defeating our enemies and al-Qaeda in the battle of wits in the interrogation room. And American interrogators have proven this time and time again, from World War II through Vietnam, through Panama, through the First Gulf War. And let’s go back to the successes of American interrogators. You know, American interrogators found Saddam Hussein without using torture. We found and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda Iraq, which helped turn the Iraq war, without using torture….
And finally:
And one thing you’ll never hear the torture supporters talk about, Amy, is the long-term negative consequences of torture. They won’t talk about the fact that al-Qaeda uses it to recruit. They won’t talk about the fact that future Americans are going to be subjected to the same techniques by future enemies using our own actions as justification. They’re not going to talk about the fact that it makes detainees more resistant to interrogations as soon as they walked in the interrogation room, because they see us all as torturers. So they’re not going to talk about all these long-term negative consequences.
Alexander was there, and conducted effective, productive interrogations that didn’t resort to torture. And it worked. Watch the entire interview, and read the whole transcript. It’s well worth the time.
What information was gathered under Obama’s order, through Obama’s actions, or were only made possible by Barack Obama?
What makes Barack Obama essential to this plan?
Waterboarding isn’t torture.
@ Charlie:
…” just like professional interrogators have been saying for years, always result in either limited information, false information or no information.”
You smokin’ dope to Charlie? Who the hell is Amy?
Glad you asked whoever you are.
Amy is the person at Democracy Now interviewing Matthew Alexander, a former senior military interrogator in Iraq. His latest book is Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious Al Qaeda Terrorist. He is a Fellow at UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations.
Matthew Alexander knows a little more about interrogation then does the disgraced former Atty. General Mukasey.
Gastergrab says “Waterboarding isn’t torture.”
I guess it’s only torture when the Japanese or Filipinos do it.
This must be what “American Exceptionalism” means to some people.
No actionable intel huh. Bullshit. Among other things we got was a plot to hijack more airliners in LA and those returning from Europe over the Atlantic.
Enhanced interrogation works. Its just too bad we don’t apply AQ’s method’s or the method’s employed by the Pisslamic countries around the world.
Anyone who thinks that enhanced interrogation methods don’t work need look no further than the methods used to extract information from Bill Buckley by the Syrians and the Iranians.
He gave up everything. And all we use is discomfort, water and loud noise. BFD.
BTW, even the CIA has or used to have, “black box” operations, that not every CIA officer was privy to. Just like the military has “black ops” that very few are privy to. The compartmentalization of intel is necessary to prevent any disclosure by rogue operatives of certain ops or disclosure as damaging as Bill Buckley’s was to our ops in Lebanon and the ME.
Anyone who has a working brain can hear a good discussion of the Bin Laden Op and a bonus discussion of the effectiveness of enhanced interrogations here:
http://www.securefreedomradio.org/2011/05/04/rep-trent-franks-john-bolton-jeff-smith-jim-hanson/#podPressPlayerSpace_1
@Charlie:
“This must be what “American Exceptionalism” means to some people.”
Nah, that’s what it means to you.
Oh and BTW, when it’s performed by skilled interrogators, torture is extremely effective. It must always be done in a logical and comparative way.
Single sources of information are impossible to corroborate.
The evidence revealed under torture is only a lead, they’re not the facts themselves. It tells the interrogators where to look, not what to believe. The truth is established only after first-hand confirmation. (as was done in the case of Bin Laden)
————–
You must also not let the subject acquire any pattern to your question that might allow him to determine what you already know, and what you don’t know.
Example:
“I’m going to ask you a series of questions, some of which i already know the answers to. Some of your wrong answers will be punished now. And some of your wrong answers will be punished later…….but they will be punished.”
.
(No actionable intel huh. Bullshit. Among other things we got was a plot to hijack more airliners in LA and those returning from Europe over the Atlantic.
Enhanced interrogation works. – 9/11 infidel)
You wingnuts cling to your lies don’t you. Your claim was debunked years ago.
“If the plot to take down the library tower was already stopped in 2002, how could Sheikh Mohammed’s water-boarded confession in 2003 have prevented the Library Tower attack if the Bush administration “broke up” that attack during the previous year?”
Notice that trolls always seem to have those formal sounding names?
- Jim Johnson
- Samuel Smith
And when they want to appear genuinely sincere, they throw a middle initial in there.
Lucias T……….what the heck was his last name again?
.
obama has his proven interrogation technique of chatting over tea and cookies and a pledge to add known terrorists to his administation payroll. It has NEVER failed yet.
Charlie:
“You wingnuts cling to your lies don’t you. Your claim was debunked years ago.”
Yes you are a wingnut. And you do cling to your lies. Why don’t you go project somewhere else.
Those who would argue against torture on moral grounds-to obtain life saving information are immoral themselves. Is it “moral” to lets say let 500K innocent people be killed by a rogue nuclear device in the hands of a terrorist when torture could have cause him to give up information which would have stopped it ? How the fuck is *that* moral….I woudl hate to have to be the one to stand before God with teh knowledge that I may well have stopped that atrocity and argue my choice was “moral”.
An Open Letter to Delusional Rightwing Folks
I understand what you’re feeling.
You want so very badly to feel happy that your boogeyman, Osama bin Laden, has been killed.
You masturbated yourself to sleep at the very thought of it for almost a decade.
But something about this whole situation doesn’t feel right to you. You can’t figure out why the news just isn’t making you as happy as you thought it would.
I’ll help you out.
It’s because our cool-as-ice black President is the one that got it done.
The cognitive dissonance that is present in your mind (go ahead, look up the term… I’ll wait…….. ok, time’s up) won’t allow you to accept that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama, on behalf of YOU, eliminated your boogeyman.
You’re feeling an odd sense of grief over an event that you thought would make you happy.
So you twist yourself in rhetorical knots trying to find a way to do ANYTHING but give Barack Obama any credit. “If only I can find a way to give the credit to a REAL American, then I can feel happy about this event like I am supposed to.”
But deep down, you know that your guy dropped the ball.
And not just on bin Laden.
(You know that the economy went into a tailspin in 2008 under your guy, because of the policies of your guy. But that’s a letter for another day when you’re in denial about dropping unemployment and a growing economy as we go into the election next year.)
You, my rightwing nutjob friend, are in the midst of the Kubler-Ross Five Stages of Grief.
The reason that torture does not work in some cases is because the methodology is flawed.
The VietCong who tortured Americans in that war were all from small villages. They had no experience in complex political thinking. They didn’t know what they were looking for, and they didn’t know how to verify any of their suspicions.
I also see an advantage to a strict separation between the interrogators (the information gatherers) and the people who determine the relevance of the information. Personal bias could easily affect the content.
If we define ‘torture’ as “anything that causes distress”, then the very act of taking someone captive in war must also apply.
.
Can we compare the IP addresses between Charlie and Registeredguest?
Registeredguest:
Here’s your reply wingnut. Why don’t you take your own masterbatory fantasies back to the Kos and get lost. Now I know that you wingnuts have terminal cases of ass where your heads should be, so there’s no hope for you. You should emulate Judas and just get it over with. You’re so much alike.
Registeredguest: “OBAMA AKBAAARRRRR!”
For anyone that’s been through Sere training (like me), you’ll find a Rocky Versace now and again, but what you will more commonly find is that people break under enhanced interrogation.
In my BN, 600 guys went through SERE and only one guy didn’t break. Its good training, but its nothing compared to what AQ or any other jihadist org does to their captured prisoners. Evidence: Bill Buckley, Col Higgins, the two PFC’s from the 101 that were captured and murdered in Iraq…etc…etc…
To try and use the idea that we’re somehow better than the bad guys and should not use enhanced interrogation is to fall into the relativist trap that somehow these 7th century vermin are just like us and would return the favor as did the Germans in WWII (for the most part).
Our enemies fight by street rules. We fight by limited Margues of Queensbury rules, which get us no kind of reciprocation whatsoever.
To our enemies we are “unclean” infidels worthy of death or slavery. Its written in their Muslim death manuals.
To put a snuff film of what they do to us (Danny Pearl) is more about “sowing terror into the hearts of unbelievers” to spread the deen than by any civilized notions of reciprocity and behaviors.
These people kill for fun. They get off on it.
So fuck them and their pimp daddy god. They deserve what we gave the Japanese Jihadis in WWII: fire and lead.
“Even if it were true that some tidbit was blurted out by a prisoner while being tortured by C.I.A. interrogators, that does not remotely justify Mr. Bush’s decision to violate the law and any acceptable moral standard.
This was not the “ticking time bomb” scenario that Bush-era officials often invoked to rationalize abusive interrogations. If, as Representative Peter King, the Long Island Republican, said, information from abused prisoners “directly led” to the redoubt, why didn’t the Bush administration follow that trail years ago? [...]
The battered intelligence community should now be basking in the glory of a successful operation. It should not be dragged back into the muck and murk by political figures whose sole agenda seems to be to rationalize actions that cost this country dearly — in our inability to hold credible trials for very bad men and in the continued damage to our reputation.” – NY Times
The right side is insane. Pure and simple. So you are going to believe all the failed members of the failed Bush administration? Really? For a group so hung up on God and Jeebus, you all sure do love you some violence. It must come from your insignificant little lives and the ugly women you sleep with? Maybe the box headed children you create? Maybe the fact that a wise and accomplished black man achieved something your little boy-king couldn’t?
How about cheering for America? You remember America, right? Rush talks about her sometimes – usually with disrespect and hate.
Good post Jimbo. Couldn’t agree more.
@Jimbo, a wise and accomplished black man accomplished what exactly? A SEAL who had better remain nameless and faceless sent OBL to his fate. How about a cheer for America with no fucking color mentioned shithead?
A short history on torture:
Torture is an ancient practice with 3 historical precidents:
1) inflicting serious pain (including severe permanent injury and even death) simply for pain’s sake.
2) inflicting serious pain (including severe permanent injury and even death) in punishment for a crime.
3) inflicting serious pain (including severe permanent injury and even death) to elicit a confession for a perceived crime.
Judeo-Christian society (read Western society) abandoned the first precident quite early, around the 4th Century AD. The 2nd precident was abandoned much later (after the 16th Century), and the 3rd precident was abandoned about the 11th Century because confessions elicited through severe pain were deemed unreliable: the victim would say whatever the torturer wanted to hear just to make the pain stop (keep in mind, these were confessions, not providing information…the victim knew exactly what the torturers wanted to hear).
The common theme among historical torture is severe physical pain: it was not uncommon for a victim to lose a limb or his/her life as a result of a bout with prolonged torture. Pain was an important part of all of these. This is what the Japanese sought with their use of waterboarding. It should be noted that scores of people died or were seriously injured when the Japanese waterboarded them.
The difference between what is classically considered torture, which certain 7th Century wanna-be cultures excel at today, and “enhanced interrogation techniques” is the idea of physical pain. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and such methods create an uncomfortable situation (some moreso than others), and seek to use the prolonged discomfort to get the person to provide information. It should also be noted that to my knowledge, no one has died as a result of American waterboarding, nor have they been seriously injured.
Funny, failure used to mean that you sucked at what you did and were sacked for it. The classic examples of “failed” administrations or “failed” members of administrations are LBJ, Ford, and Carter…all of which were only elected to one term because of their ineptitude demonstrated in office. Bush was elected to two terms, and Mukasey only left office because Bush’s second term was up. Not only that, but a number of Bush’s “failed” policies were continued by his successor, the wise and accomplished black man that holds office today. Does this mean that the current president is a failure, or that those policies weren’t failures?