The Cover Story that Serves as a Cover Story
Check out this sentence, which appears at the end of the Executive Summary of a document purporting to debunk the “cover stories” of detainees who claimed to have traveled to Afghanistan to teach the Koran.
Mujahideen that traveled to Afghanistan following the attacks of 11 September 2001 did so with the knowledge that Usama Bin Laden and Al-Qaida were the likely perpetrators of the attack.
Note the assumptions. First, that the detainees picked up in Afghanistan were, by definition, mujahadeen. The document doesn’t define the term. It does contextualize the term “mujahadeen” within the fight against the Russians, then calls recent “recruits” mujahadeen uncritically. And nowhere in the document does it explain how to assess a detainee’s claim that he was not an active fighter, a trainee at an al Qaeda camp, or even a trainee more generally.
Nowhere does the document address evidentiary problems assessing when a detainee left for Afghanistan and/or arrived there and whether the departure preceded 9/11 (though this is one of the least problematic parts of this statement).
As to the claim that detainees that traveled to Afghanistan after 9/11 did so “with the knowledge that Usama Bin Laden and Al-Qaida were the likely perpetrators of the attack”? Here’s the shoddy proof the document offers for the claim that these detainees assumed to be trained fighters knew of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden’s role in it.
There was already speculation on 11 September 2001 as to the origins of the perpetrators of the attacks, and the US Government publicly named Usama bin Laden and Al-Qaida no later than 12 September 2001. Even before this announcement, there were communications between extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere identifying UBL as the sponsor of the attacks. Prior to the attacks, the recruits would have no way of knowing they would soon be engaged in a battle with a US-led coalition because of the deaths of thousands of innocent people. This does not decrease the recruits [sic] involvement with terrorist groups including Al-Qaida, however, as their travel to Afghanistan and their room and board in the months following their arrival were paid for by the Al-Qaida, the Taliban, and or other supporting extremist groups [sic] fund raising activities and the recruit elected to remain in Afghanistan. Some detainees state they attempted to leave but could not, this too is part of their cover story to show they were not in Afghanistan of their own free will. After 11 September 2001, the new recruits could no longer claim ignorance to the actions of Al-Qaida and the likelihood of hostilities resulting from the US desire to bring those responsible to justice. Therefore, especially following the attacks, Muahideen traveling to Afghanistan did so with the distinct desire to defend UBL and his organization.
Now, there are a lot of basic problems with the claim about speculation that al Qaeda executed the attacks just after 9/11, not least that key players within the Bush Administration were fighting the argument at the time that al Qaeda caused the attack. Ultimately, this amounts to an argument that because Richard Clarke was sure al Qaeda caused the attack, it meant the Americans generally were loudly backing that certainty rather than, for example, trying to turn this into a war against Iraq.
Then there’s the problem that intelligence in US possession by the time this was issued in August 2004 made clear that even Osama bin Laden himself did not expect the US to retaliate as they did. If he was expecting the US to respond with limited missile strikes, than how they hell are purported recruits (ignoring the problem of proving they were recruits) supposed to expect the full response the US made?
Then there’s the implicit problem–with the reference to Al-Qaida “and or other supporting extremist groups”–that many of these purported mujahadeen weren’t even purportedly training with al Qaeda. Even if they knew al Qaeda carried out the attack, where is the proof that because the US would, at some point in the future, assert that those “supporting extremist groups” were affiliated with the attack, recent recruits of those “supporting” groups had to have known that the US would ultimately deem those groups as supporting as well?
But the really big problem here is the failure to even attempt to establish what the media/communications consumption of someone purporting to be teaching the Koran in rural Afghanistan would have, and whether it might credibly include awareness of what Richard Clarke was arguing within the Situation Room of the White House in the days right after 9/11 (not least given the assertion that a number of these detainees had limited schooling). I mean, most Americans on September 12, 2001, watching footage of the attack over and over on CNN, probably didn’t know that al Qaeda caused the attack; many still doubt it did. But we’re insisting someone reading the Koran in Afghanistan would know?
It all feels very familiar. When confronted with refutations of their claims that Iraq had WMD before the war, the US repeatedly attributed those refutations–by people like Hans Blix and Mohammed el Baradei (not people who happened to leave for Afghanistan at an inauspicious time)–to Iraqi cover stories. Anything that didn’t confirm their assumptions was, by definition, a cover story. Only even with all the intelligence claims on Iraq that have been released, we never got to see how shoddy the logic those arguing it was all a cover story really was.
Seeing the logic, though, I’m not sure which is more appalling and embarrassing: that many people treated this as valid analysis? Or that someone had either such bad logical skills or such a desire to generate propaganda that he’d consider this report a coherent argument?
I suspect it was written by the same people who were eager to start a couple of wars. Certain it seems to have been written by someone whose knowledge of Afghanistan was a bit lacking.
(Stay safe: they’re having tornado warnings in upstate NY, as well as everyplace that had storms yesterday.)
It was 2004, so it was written by someone who wanted to sustain wars.
But, yeah. Tornado warnings. And flood warnings. Fat Al Gore hates me.
Whoa! Where did that come from?
Bob in AZ
Put me down for “both.”
And “both” is not merely twice as appalling and embarrassing as one of your options or the other. In cases like this, the growth in appallingly embarrassing is exponential, not linear.
OBL to this day is not wanted by the FBI for 9/11.
from the FBI file:
FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitive
Murder of U.S. Nationals Outside the United States; Conspiracy to Murder U.S. Nationals Outside the United States; Attack on a Federal Facility Resulting in Death
USAMA BIN LADEN
Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world.
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/usama-bin-laden
When a spokesman for the FBI asked why bin Laden had not been indicted for the 9/11 attacks, his answer was that the FBI does not have evidence to that effect.
Bin Laden Not Wanted for 9/11.
It is abundantly clear from the poor state of these files, maintained in this state over several years, that neither facts nor establishing them robustly enough to survive sustained public or judicial scrutiny were ever serious goals of this government. They didn’t need them; they made thei4r own reality.
That should read like a count in an indictment that includes a charge of depraved indifference to human life.
From the Independent:
Here are the links from PLoS [“a peer-reviewed open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science”] website:
The first seems to be an introductory article for the second [haven’t had a chance to read it all]
Medical Complicity in Torture at Guantánamo Bay: Evidence Is the First Step Toward Justice; PLos Medicine Editors; [rec’d 9/16/10; Accepted 3/16/11; Published 4/26/11]
Neglect of Medical Evidence of Torture in Guantánamo Bay: A Case Series; Vincent Iacopino, Stephen N. Xenakis; 4/2011
Many thanks.
Andy Worthington writes about it today:
Study Says Doctors at Guantánamo Neglected Or Concealed Evidence of Torture, Plus My Interview with Press TV; Andy Worthington; 4/28/11
Crossposting — 2009 radio interview:
Cushioning! And they were only helping him so he could save lives…
Sweet enabling release… and it’s not like they’re even criminals or anything…
Those are Abu Zubaydah’s words, a direct quote, really?
Or CIA transcription?
or CIA sock puppet transcription… ?
(Remember Suskind reporting what the CIA’s code name for Cheney was? It was Edgar— as in Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist.)
“…Now, there are a lot of basic problems with the claim about speculation that al Qaeda executed the attacks just after 9/11, not least that key players within the Bush Administration were fighting the argument at the time that al Qaeda caused the attack. Ultimately, this amounts to an argument that because Richard Clarke was sure al Qaeda caused the attack, it meant the Americans generally were loudly backing that certainty rather than, for example, trying to turn this into a war against Ira…”
my particular view is that the attack on the wtc in sept 2001 was a “family matter” involving a continuation by pakistani citizen khalid sheik mohammad of the earlier efforts of his nephew ramsey yousef (1993).
al-queada, i suspect, was approached by sheik mohammed, pursuing his family’s vendetta, and just bought in for a small price to trhe plot.
bin-laden supplied the 19 young saudi men who agreed to be martyrs.
but, fundamentally, the wtc attack plan was a pakistani plot of revenge for a previously “failed and jailed” pakistani plot on the wtc.
OT– I’m cross-posting links I thought you’d find interesting in view of the state-appointed emergency financial managers (EFM) (hat tip Rania Khalek for doing a couple of nice posts on this including “Corporate Coup D’état Coming Soon To A City Near You,” Apr. 25, 2011):
“S&P/Case-Shiller: Home Prices Rise in Just One Big Town: Detroit!” (WSJ.Com, Apr. 26, 2011)
Meanwhile …
(excerpt from “Home Prices in 20 U.S. Cities Drop Most in More Than Year on Foreclosures,” Bloomberg.Com, By Alex Kowalski and Shobhana Chandra, Apr 26, 2011)
And there’s “Wall Street Hearts Charter Schools, Gets Rich Off Them” (By: David Dayen Monday May 10, 2010 1:50 pm)
I am disgusted by the bankster pillaging of Detroit.
Op-ed by JJSr. pointing out a couple more facts about Benton Harbor and what is at stake there.
Thanks, mzcheif and prostratedragon.
Time for an uprising in Benton Harbor; Jesse Jackson; 4/26/11 [linked @9]
O/T Say what?
Obama to name Panetta Defense Secretary, Patraeus to lead CIA: report LINK.
The disconnects and logical lacunae this post points out in the military documents are, rather than being evidence of idiocy or worse, more likely to be the fruit of a particular facet of the military mind-set: the need to be subordinate and obey the orders of superiors. This facet is exposed in situations where a superior states, usually in a simple declarative sentence, that “X is the state of affairs.”
This might be something along the lines of “The enemy forces have gone over those mountains to our south.” or “The moon is made of green cheese.” The point is, the statement is meant to end debate, and is usually made to resolve a dubious situation so a particular direction of a mission can be undertaken and accomplished. In other words, it sharpens the hearers’/recipients’ focus such that a particular objective may be sought (and achieved) without distraction.* Thus, if there was some debate as to whether the enemy forces had really gone over the mountains to the south, there would be a natural and logical tendency to build plans and operations with hedges and sidetracks that would support chasing down the enemy if they had not gone over the mountains to the south. It would detract from the principle of objective if everyone was going in every other direction.
Moreover, as I stated above, this sort of declaration of “the state of affairs is X” is a test of subordinacy of the subordinates receiving the statement. Thus, if the colonel states the moon is made of green cheese, the proper response to the lieutenant who then turns up proof it is made of rock and not cheese is: “thank you”. If he persists, it’s “at ease.” (that’s STFU in Army) If he persists further, he is, by definition, being insubordinate.
The fault for the defective declaration of the state of affairs is not the subordinates’ though, people being people, superiors will frequently dump it on them anyway. When things go to shit because the enemy didn’t go over the mountains to the south or the moon really is made of rock and not cheese, the higher-ups (who decided what the colonel would tell his subordinates the state of affairs was) will decide what the new declaration of the state of affairs will be.
The superior making the declaration also had his doubts but he was smart/experienced enough to know that (if only for the good of his career) he must follow another principle: “take your orders (no matter how wrongheaded or distasteful) and make them your own.” A good example of this, BTW, is from the movie Apollo 13, where the Tom Hanks character, before the flight, goes around and around with the NASA heirarchy over the heirarchy’s desire to swap out Kevin Bacon’s character (who they believe to have been exposed to rubella). Hanks goes around and around fighting against the heirarchy and finaly loses. When he goes in to tell Bacon he’s out, though, he’s totally on board with it, expresses no doubt, and tells Bacon it’s all Hanks’ decision and no one else’s.
So, what’s at work here is really the bureaucratic imperative expressing itself as seeming illogic and stupidity. It’s also how the military mind creates and maintains a narrative.
We saw something like this when the Maryland state police/counterterrism folks had listed Quakers and vegetarians as terrists in their database. The computer form in the database only had a couple checkboxes, the last of which was “suspected terrist”, and the rules the operator had to follow required the operator to check at least one box. Anything that didn’t fit anywhere else was lumped under “suspected terrist”. Creating a narrative (That also benefitted their budget, too).
Bureaucracy and banality at work.
–
* The US Army traditionally teaches there are nine principles of war, of which one is “Objective”. This is defined (officially) as “Direct every military operation towards a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective”.
Lets not forget that millions of people have either died or had their lives ruined by this blatant indifference to human life.
And that America, and the rest of the world for that matter, is now completely based on this obviously false Cover Story.
Letting this continue uncorrected, will completely destroy our Country.
http://www.markdotzler.com/Mark_Dotzler/split.html
“When a spokesman for the FBI was asked”, that should have been.
The policy docs especially but others I’ve read so far read to me like a mix of superstition and propaganda. Isn’t that the political situation we keep finding ourselves in? Some of the people running this show are true believers and some are utter cynics with other goals, but those two logics dovetail at some point. Has the US gov’t become a cult?
I’m still trying to get my head around the sourcing for this doc, and also the question of who (or, at least, what kind of person) wrote it. There are so many flat claims made about how prisoners were trained to develop cover stories but only one vague reference to training manuals found in Afghanistan. Do all those points come from the training manuals? Because a lot of them sound to me like the faith-beliefs/professional ideology of the various psychologists we’ve heard of involved at GTMO and at the black sites.
It’s like reverse-reverse psychology, and it is making my head hurt.
Apparently everyone I have interviewed for software dev jobs at my current employer has been trained in al Qaeda counter-interrogation techniques. All of those “counter-interrogation techniques” are what people do when they have no idea what the answer to a question is, but are highly motivated to say something.
Is that how we characterize the behavior of Mormon and other missionaries who travel to the corners of the developing world? Is it how we want host governments to react to their proselytizing, that it is a terrorist act or equivalent to providing terrorists material support? If they did, would we fire the same big guns we rolled out against the Germans, who considered Scientology a cult?
It is my understanding that the development of cover stories is de rigeur for agents or military personnel going behind “enemy lines.”
This goes back to Gary Powers and the U-2 incident, or even earlier to the POWs, who admitted their roles and function as pilots, what they were assigned to, etc. Powers, apparently, was allowed to tell some of what he knew, but Secret Reconnaissance Operations pilots and personnel shot down over Russian and East Europe had different orders, to have a plausible cover story. (The U-2 in those days, btw, took off from Badabare AF base in Pakistan.)
This came up in the research Jason and I did on Jessen’s notes, and earlier days in SERE. Class SV-91, which was reverse-engineered into the EITs, had a predecessor, SV-83. The latter, which is still taught I believe, was to give resistance techniques to pilots and aircraft personnel shot down on secret reconnaissance missions. — If one goes back and reads about the American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane brought down in China on April 1, 2001, you can find a bunch of stories with a number of now-well-known names from JPRA involved in the recovery and debriefing of the Americans brought back from China out of this mission. Spokesman Review made some of these links in an article back in Aug. 2007, and I’ve mentioned it from time to time over the years.
From the book By Any Means Necessary: America’s Secret Air War in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) by William E. Burrows
Did you know that the Lewis and Clark expedition utilized a cover story to hide military aspects of their work? I thought not.
Thank you lysias — fascinating, important information that few know about.
EW, this is a tangent re “proxy detention” and it’s a long and twisty road, and apologies if you’ve already done this (again), but: This article from UK GTMO defence lawyer at HuffPo took me back to this odd news, which I had missed, which then got me searching here, where I found espec a January piece from Daphne Eviatar (a MyFDL), which also got me thinking about your earlier post re Obama’s signing statement that wasn’t a signing statement.
My question (and I do have one): Do you think that Obama knew that proxy detention was implicit in the bill he signed and notated, as the congresscritturs appear not to have realized, or even if he didn’t, don’t you think that it is?
(Sorry not to have included FDL/EW links above, but I am working with a terrible slowdown — like typing through molasses in January.)
Detainee 001: