Hooray for Guantanamo and Torture!

[PanzerJaeger]

Well said PJ. I would expand it to every leader of a group of people ever have had some kind of tools that would not be acceptable to you and me.

Azi Tohak. I haven't seen that screen name around these parts in quite a while.


The administration's response to this issue is very interesting. Instead of outright denial, they seem to have chosen obfuscation, even bordering on grudging acceptance, which is telling in itself.

Today, White House Press Secratery Jay Carney was asked directly about whether enhanced interrogation contributed to the capture and his non-answer was surprisingly cryptic.

REPORTER: Can you say if there's been any change in President Obama's opposition to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques?

MR. CARNEY: No change whatsoever.

REPORTER: Were any results of such techniques used in helping to track down bin Laden?

MR. CARNEY: Mark, the fact is that no single piece of
information led to the successful mission that occurred on Sunday, and multiple detainees provided insights into the networks of people who might have been close to bin Laden.

But reporting from detainees was just a slice of the information that has been gathered by incredibly diligent professionals over the years in the intelligence community.

And it simply strains credulity to suggest that a piece of information
that may or may not have been gathered in — eight years ago somehow directly led to a successful mission on Sunday. That's just not the case.

REPORTER: I wasn't suggesting it.

MR. CARNEY: OK. Others have.

NPR notes on the Carney statement and also a similar non-answer from Senator Feinstein:

Read closely, what Carney says is actually not a full-throated denial that intelligence obtained from harsh interrogations could have played a role. Rather, he says there were many pieces of intelligence that contributed.

His goal seemed to be to downplay the singular importance of any information that might have been obtained through waterboarding.

Note that Feinstein, like Carney, doesn't definitively shoot down the idea that intelligence derived from waterboarding contributed to running down Obama.

Further, former CIA Director Leon Panetta was asked about the role of enhanced interrogation and gave a similarly obscure answer.

On the role of interrogation:
BRIAN WILLIAMS: Can you confirm that it was as a result of water boarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after Bin Laden?
LEON PANETTA: Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information and that was true here… It's a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got… I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I'm also saying that, you know, the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.
BRIAN WILLIAMS: So finer point, one final time, enhanced interrogation techniques -- which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years -- that includes water boarding?
LEON PANETTA: That's correct.

It seems as though the administration, which has so vehemently stressed its anti-enhanced interrogation stance in the past, would take these several opportunities to categorically deny the role of enhanced interrogations in the capture of bin Laden.

Again, though, this is a debate that doesn't need to happen. There is little doubt that enhanced interrogation did yield actionable intelligence that directly stopped terrorist attacks in America and contributed to the capture/killing of many al Qaeda members. However, the revelation of the program in the media drastically changed its cost/benefit analysis, making it untenable. Further, the intelligence deficit immediately after 9/11 that necessitated the program is no more as the United States has developed a sophisticated and effective intelligence network in the region.

As tempting as it is for conservatives to go on a victory lap over these revelations, such a course of action is damaging to the nation's reputation and its political discourse. For better or for worse, the program is over and not likely to be resuscitated or necessitated again any time soon. The idealists are very correct in their belief that these practices are not what America stands for and the realists are very correct in their belief that the same practices are sometimes necessary. That is why it is best to keep such cognitively dissonant presidential directives out of the press.



Edit: On another note entirely, this story caught my attention.

US President Barack Obama gets precious few opportunities to announce a victory. So it's no wonder he chose grand words on Sunday night as the TV crews' spotlights shone upon him and he informed the nation about the deadly strike against Osama bin Laden. "Justice has been done," he said.

It may be that this sentence comes back to haunt him in the years to come. What is just about killing a feared terrorist in his home in the middle of Pakistan? For the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and for patriotic Americans who saw their grand nation challenged by a band of criminals, the answer might be simple. But international law experts, who have been grappling with the question of the legal status of the US-led war on terror for years, find Obama's pithy words on Sunday night more problematic.

The Guantanamo story was huge, and the American public was subjected to years of whinging in the press about how it was the 'WORST HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE EVAR!!1' However, President Obama's targeted killings of people, including many civilians, in a nation we are not at war with is seemingly just as legally dubious and the results to the people involved are arguably far worse. One wonders why this story didn't ignite the passion that the Gitmo one did.