Whatever its legality, the killing of the al-Qaeda leader drew on pre-existing strategies, write SCOTT WILSONand ANNE KORNBLUTin Washington
AS PRESIDENT Barack Obama celebrates the signature national security success of his tenure, he has a long list of people to thank. On that list: George W Bush.
After the September 11th, 2001, attacks, Bush waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have forged a military so skilled it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication. Public tolerance for military operations over the past decade has shifted to the degree that a mission carried out deep inside a sovereign country has raised little domestic protest.
And a detention and interrogation system that Obama once condemned as contrary to American values produced one early lead that, years later, brought US forces to the high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and a fatal encounter with an unarmed Osama bin Laden.
But the bridge connecting the two administrations has also led Obama to the same contested legal terrain over how to fight against stateless enemies and whether values should be sacrificed in the pursuit of security.
“We, in the Obama administration, absolutely benefited from an enormous body of work and effort that went into understanding al-Qaeda and pursuing bin Laden,” said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. “There’s also a broader set of legal questions that we’ve been wrestling with, and some have not been resolved.”
He said these included the closing of the military brig at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where some of the al-Qaeda leaders who provided the early clues that led to bin Laden’s hideout were held.
Obama invited Bush to join him yesterday at the former site of the World Trade Centre in Lower Manhattan, where the president plans to lay a wreath and meet families of those who lost relatives in the attacks. Bush declined the invitation.
Obama campaigned against the ends-justify-the-means legal system adopted by the Bush administration to capture, detain, question and try terrorist suspects, including those at the centre of bin Laden’s pursuit.
After pledging to close Guantánamo within a year of taking office, Obama has failed to do so, and he has chosen to alter, rather than scrap, the Bush-era military commission system to try terrorist suspects. Human rights groups have called the changes improvements.
Obama has abolished the use of harsh interrogation techniques, which some Bush administration officials say produced essential intelligence in the hunt for bin Laden.
As former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Sean Hannity on Tuesday, “I think that anyone who suggests the enhanced techniques – let’s be blunt, waterboarding – did not produce an enormous amount of valuable intelligence just isn’t facing the truth.”
Benjamin Wittes, the research director in public law at the Brookings Institution, said, “The executive branch does not fundamentally alter its nature when a presidency changes . . . It’s very easy to focus on changes in interrogation guidance or standing detention authority,” he said. “But the truth is three successive administrations have really made a priority out of capturing, finding and killing Osama bin Laden, and there’s a lot of continuity in that.”
The existence of the courier who helped lead US intelligence to bin Laden’s compound surfaced within the CIA’s secret prison system as early as 2002. It came from al-Qaeda operatives held there.
Some, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques, including the simulated drowning known as waterboarding, although it is not known whether the courier, whose nom de guerre was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, arose as a direct result of those sessions.
Four years later, after Bush banned waterboarding and closed the CIA black sites, detainee interrogations revealed the courier’s importance and led interrogators to think he might still be in contact with bin Laden.
It is unclear whether that information emerged under duress, but White House officials say it was only one piece of a vast intelligence effort that included surveillance, eavesdropping and other time-tested techniques.
As Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, put it: “A piece here, a piece there, all put together.” But Porter Goss, a former CIA director during the Bush administration, said, “A great percentage of what we know about al-Qaeda and the players comes out of the interrogation programme. It’s a continuum and an ever-growing story. The more we found out, the more we knew,” he said.
“If you ask me which particular ingredient we could have done without, that’s impossible. That’s a fool’s-gold chase.”
In recent days, Pakistani officials have suggested the operation was illegal, calling it a “unauthorised unilateral action”. The administration did not seek Pakistan’s permission, fearing bin Laden would be tipped off and, hours after the raid, a senior administration official told reporters, “The United States had a legal and moral obligation to act on the information it had.”
But administration officials, including Obama, have made clear in public and in private meetings with Pakistani officials that the US would pursue such a mission if the opportunity arose. White House press secretary Jay Carney said on Wednesday that stance continues to be US policy.
"There is simply no question that this operation was lawful," Carney said. "We acted in the nation's self-defence." – ( Washington Post)