The Great Debate

The cost of killing Osama bin Laden

John Yoo

Sep 7, 2011 11:34 EDT

The successful operation to kill bin Laden followed in the steps of earlier victories in the war on terror made possible by the enhanced interrogation program. Interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, thought at the time to be al-Qaeda’s operations planner, in the spring of 2002 led to the capture of much of al-Qaeda’s top leadership at the time.

On September 11, 2002, Pakistan captured Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the right-hand man to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and the primary conduit between al-Qaeda leaders and 9/11 commander Mohammed Atta. Six months later, American and Pakistani agents landed KSM, the “principal architect” of the 9/11 attacks and a “terrorist entrepreneur.”

Not only did the captures of these three commanders take significant parts of the al-Qaeda leadership out of action, they also yielded intelligence that prevented future terrorist attacks. The 9/11 Commission Report is a testament to the large amount of information that they provided.

Both Porter Goss, then-Director of the CIA, and Pat Roberts, then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said publicly that they provided “actionable intelligence.” General Michael Hayden, CIA Director at the end of the Bush administration, reported that most of the United States’ information on al-Qaeda during the first years of the war came from the interrogation of these al-Qaeda leaders. If civil libertarians had their way, however, this information would not have come into the hands of the United States. They argue that any effort to coerce a detainee constitutes “torture”— conflating any interrogation method that goes beyond standard police-house questioning with a war crime.

Furthermore, human rights lawyers and some in the media have spun a broader “torture narrative.” The Bush administration allegedly deprived al-Qaeda of Geneva Convention protections as part of a conscious conspiracy to torture al-Qaeda leaders. These interrogation methods “migrated” to Iraq, where they produced the horrible abuses at Abu Ghraib.

This conspiracy theory is nothing but an exercise in hyperbole and partisan smear. The Bush administration went through its internal struggles over the Geneva issue only three months after the 9/11 attacks. American forces were still in Afghanistan and President Bush would not launch his political offensive on Iraq until the fall of 2002. Iraq presented a different situation entirely—a war between nation-states that was clearly covered under the Geneva Conventions.

Instead of conspiracy theories, the war on terror presents us with hard questions on coercive interrogation. Federal law prohibits torture. But limiting a captured terrorist to six hours’ sleep, isolating him, interrogating him for several hours, or requiring him to exercise does not constitute “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” within the meaning of that law. Surely the United States is not required to treat captured terrorists engaged in war against the United States as if they were suspects held at an American police station. Limiting our officials to polite questioning, and demanding that terrorists receive lawyers, Miranda warnings, and eventually a court trial, are more than likely to be ineffective in stopping future attacks.

Should torture be part of the U.S.’s counterterrorism approach?

Reuters Staff

Jun 24, 2009 09:44 EDT

The following piece was co-written by Matthew Alexander, Joe Navarro and Lieutenant General Robert Gard (USA-Ret.) They are pictured from left to right.

Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a special operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.” He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.

Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence and counterterrorism expert, is an adjunct faculty member at the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.

Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, Jr. (USA-Ret.) is president emeritus at the Monterey Institute for International Studies and a senior military fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. The views expressed are their own.

President Obama decided not to release a new group of detainee abuse photographs because he believes they would inflame our enemies and threaten American troops. Indeed, the shocking photos from Abu Ghraib have served as a powerful recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and have sparked outrage across the world.

It is not the release of the photos, however, that would elicit horror and anger. It is their brutal content and the misguided policies they reflect. The controversy surrounding the photos and the president’s release of four Department of Justice memos have brought into sharp focus a debate that has been in the shadows of public discourse for several years: Should the U.S. include torture and cruelty in its counterterrorism arsenal?