John Yoo claims that Obama ordered the killing rather than capture of OBL in order to avoid having to make hard decisions regarding his detention and interrogation:
Mr. Obama’s policies now differ from their Bush counterparts mainly on the issue of interrogation. As Sunday’s operation put so vividly on display, Mr. Obama would rather kill al Qaeda leaders—whether by drones or special ops teams—than wade through the difficult questions raised by their detention. This may have dissuaded Mr. Obama from sending a more robust force to attempt a capture.
Really? I am perfectly willing to grant that Bush-era interrogation policies may have yielded information on which this raid was partially built, but I think that Yoo, whom I respect and who has been unfairly personally demonized for his good faith service to the country, may be entering fantasy-land here. It strikes me as highly unlikely that this military strategy was devised simply to avoid the possibility of interrogation, with its alleged “difficult questions.”
Heather,
Why would it be so wrong for Obama to have made a military strategy decision based in part on consideration of the possibility of the interrogation? The killing of OBL is as perhaps as important symbolically as substantively — it is a victory for the country around which the citizens can unite. If it were followed by years of controversy and bickering over exactly how we should be treating/interrogating bin Laden, the victory would be diminished. The decision to opt for a pure defeat of bin Laden seems sensible to me.
I think that the inability of the White House to get it’s story straight reduces the unlikelyhood of Mr. Yoo’s position. That, and the preference for drone strikes.
Yeah, I find that very unlikely as well. Although there are some troubling issues about how it was handled. Especially the news releases. The WH would have been far, far, far better off simply saying details would be released in the future when people were debriefed. Instead they’ve completely mismanaged the release of information losing a lot of their credibility.
It’s still not at all clear what the rules of engagement were for OBL. It now appears OBL wasn’t even armed, let alone not shooting back while holding his wife as an unwilling hostage as initially reported. The talking point now is that they were worried OBL might have an explosive vest, but given everything else that’s been said it’s hard to take this at face value.
Obama unfortunately now has the level of trust that I think Bush had in terms of getting the benefit of doubt. This has the unfortunate consequence of making people second guess him. And of course Yoo’s “guesses” are hardly the worse.
John Yoo’s editorial amounts to nothing more than ass-covering. According to Yoo, KSM was waterboarded years before he gave up the “crucial” bit of info that UBL had a courier. (Really? A courier? Give that interrogator a medal! He found out a piece of info we all assumed anyway in less than three years! Let’s waterboard everybody!)
Yoo desperately wants his “legal analysis” (given after the policy was already in effect, and so flawed he was nearly disbarred for it) to not be viewed as the nigh-treasonous, up-is-down misreading of the Geneva Conventions and Laws of War that it is. Fortunately for Yoo, he’ll always have a voice on The Wall Street Journal Editorial page, where facts aren’t as important as having the right opinions, or smearing the right guy.
The Associated Press is reporting that KSM gave up the courier’s codename, which is an important piece of info:
“Current and former U.S. officials say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, provided the nom de guerre of one of bin Laden’s most trusted aides. The CIA got similar information from Mohammed’s successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Both were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics inside CIA prisons in Poland and Romania.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/officials-cia-interrogators-at-secret-prisons-developed-first-strands-that-led-to-bin-laden/2011/05/02/AFHjfCZF_story.html
Of course, these reports are curried from unnamed sources who all have their own agendas (and are trying to cover their asses). We probably won’t get the full story for another twenty years.
As for the codename issue, I defer to Matthew Alexander, who points out that the codenames are selected precisely for religious and symbolic significance, and to make it difficult to track the person in question.
I worked intel in Iraq, including talking to people about other people, and I can tell you for a fact that nobody knows any real identities. The likelihood that UBL’s courier used that particular alias with more than a few people is very slight–it’s insurgent S.O.P., going back at least to Algeria. Also, you’re supposed to change your name every so often.
Further, the name of the courier was only revealed, according to the narrative, in 2007. KSM was waterboarded up to 2004. Given that timeliness is important toi intelligence collection, I’d call the waterboarding a failure, if its result was one nom de guerre, years after the “techniques” were employed.
I have the advantage of having worked in intelligence for more than a decade, and knowing, personally, dozens of people who served at Gitmo. I taught intelligence collection and analysis for DoD, and one of my lessons to my students was that they needed to get a hell of a lot more than a name if they wanted to track down the guy they were looking for.
My hat is off to the team(s) who milked that intel for all it was worth, and maybe the name of the courier was a crucial bit of info. But the argument thus far in favor of harsh techniques is the ticking-bomb scenario, which indisputably does not apply to this case. One alias does not an “imminent danger” make.
With all respect, if you believe this about Yoo, you haven’t been paying attention.
How does one, in good faith, justify torture?