The opinions expressed are his own.
In the space of forty minutes on May 1, 2011, two Navy SEAL teams descended on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden. They brought a rough measure of justice to the man responsible for the killing of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, and thousands of others in countries from Spain to Iraq. President Obama’s greatest victory to date in the war on terror vindicated the intelligence architecture—put into place by his predecessor—that marked the path to bin Laden’s door. According to current and former administration officials, CIA interrogators gathered the initial information that ultimately led to bin Laden’s death. The United States located al-Qaeda’s leader by learning the identity of a trusted courier from the tough interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Armed with the courier’s nom de guerre, American intelligence agencies later found him thanks to his phone call to a contact already under electronic surveillance. Last August, the courier traveled to bin Laden’s compound, but it took another eight months before the CIA became certain that the al-Qaeda leader was hiding inside.
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.
