Osama: Loose Ends and Misconceptions

I suppose you already know what story has dominated the news to the exclusion of all else, so instead of parroting the herd, I’ll try to coves some of the things that aren’t quite so obvious, in addition to a couple truly excellent videos, while avoiding the wild conspiracy theories that have emanated from the extremes where the tinfoil hats on both ends of the political spectrum meet and echo each other.  The role of torture and the problem with Pakistan are particularly interesting.

Before going there, you may be unaware that the Seal team got Osama’s computer.

The assault force of Navy SEALs snatched a trove of computer drives and disks during their weekend raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, yielding what a U.S. official called “the mother lode of intelligence.”

The special operations forces grabbed personal computers, thumb drives and electronic equipment during the lightning raid that killed bin Laden, officials told POLITICO.

“They cleaned it out,” one official said. “Can you imagine what’s on Osama bin Laden’s hard drive?”

U.S. officials are about to find out. The material is being examined at a secret location in Afghanistan.

“Hundreds of people are going through it now,” an official said, adding that intelligence operatives back in Washington are very excited to find out what they have.

“It’s going to be great even if only 10 percent of it is actionable,” the official said…

Inserted from <Politico>

Let me tell you, intelligence operatives aren’t the only ones excited to learn what’s on that computer.  Julian!  Where are you when we need you?

One meme that has popped up several times from the Republican deception factory is that the Republican torture program is somehow responsible for this success.

There’s yet another AP story, apparently being pushed hard by Bush-era intelligence officials, that it was the torture of KSM that led to bin Laden.

In a secret CIA prison in Eastern Europe years ago, al-Qaida’s No. 3 leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, gave authorities the nicknames of several of bin Laden’s couriers, four former U.S. intelligence officials said. Those names were among thousands of leads the CIA was pursuing….

The revelation that intelligence gleaned from the CIA’s so-called black sites helped kill bin Laden was seen as vindication for many intelligence officials who have been repeatedly investigated and criticized for their involvement in a program that involved the harshest interrogation methods in U.S. history.

"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.

Marcy Wheeler has much more on the torture timeline that disproves this ongoing effort to credit Bush’s torture policies for leading U.S. intelligence to bin Laden. She writes at emptywheel:

Here’s what a senior administration official said last night about when they got the intelligence on the courier.

Detainees gave us his nom de guerre or his nickname and identified him as both a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of September 11th, and a trusted assistant of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the former number three of al Qaeda who was captured in 2005.

Detainees also identified this man as one of the few al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden. They indicated he might be living with and protecting bin Laden. But for years, we were unable to identify his true name or his location.

Four years ago, we uncovered his identity, and for operational reasons, I can’t go into details about his name or how we identified him, but about two years ago, after months of persistent effort, we identified areas in Pakistan where the courier and his brother operated. [my emphasis]

In other words, while the CIA may have learned the courier’s nickname earlier, they didn’t learn his true name until “four years ago”–so late 2006 at the earliest. And they didn’t learn where the courier operated until around 2009.

From these dates 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.

The assumption is, then, that either "these men didn’t know the true name of their protégé and assistant (which is highly unlikely), or they managed to withhold that information even under torture."

Marcy reads the Cheney statement saying he "assumes" that torture led to bin Laden differently because he "admits he doesn’t know where the intelligence came from." She’s spot on in pointing out that the failure of Cheney to take full credit for the torture policy he loves so much, and spent so much time propagandizing. She says, since he "can’t claim definitively that the intelligence came from it, is a pretty good tell that he can’t say it did." She also points out that Donald Rumsfeld, who would have every reason to crow that the policies he supported had a good outcome, will only go so far as to say the intelligence might have come from detainees at Guantanamo.

Note clearly that neither of these two endorsing the idea that the waterboarding of KSM nine years ago—all 183 incidents of it—led to the name and location of the courier, which current intelligence officials say they learned in the last four years. It’s not even clear that KSM’s interrogators were even interested then in obtaining information about the couriers. The timeline, and every report that says the specific information on the courier was obtained in recent years at Guantanamo make the KSM waterboarding story incredible… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Daily Kos>

If anything, torture delayed the information by making the victims more recalcitrant.

For months we have heard that Osama was hiding in a cave somewhere, but all the while, he was living large in a million dollar mansion in the military suburb id Islamabad.  I live in a poor neighborhood, but nowhere near as poor as Pakistan.  A million dollar residence with a mystery occupant in my neighborhood would be the subject of considerable curiosity.  I cannot believe that  Osama could have maintained a setup like that without the knowledge and consent of people high in the military and/or OSI.  Rachel Maddow explains just how obvious his setup was, and interviews Richard Engel about the Pakistani connection.

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Just whose side is Pakistan on?

In any case, the “war on terror” is over.  We won.  Time to come home.  Al Qaeda has no leaders with Osama’s charisma to take his place.  Now they are a loosely joined network of extremist groups, much like the Tea Party here.

Keith Olbermann sums us the argument.

June 20 cannot come soon enough.