Bin Laden Found By Trolling The Weeds, Not By Torture
Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo have a nice and fascinating article out today telling the story of a single CIA career analyst who was the critical cog in collating the information that led to Osama bin Laden’s capture and death:
He examined and re-examined every aspect of bin Laden’s life. How did he live while hiding in Sudan? With whom did he surround himself while living in Kandahar, Afghanistan? What would a bin Laden hideout look like today?
The CIA had a list of potential leads, associates and family members who might have access to bin Laden.
“Just keep working that list bit by bit,” one senior intelligence official recalls John telling his team. “He’s there somewhere. We’ll get there.”
Goldman and Apuzzo have done good work here; it is a great story, please read it in its entirety. But I want to play off their work to take it the step further that they did not. This is not just a feel good story about what worked and went right to capture bin Laden, it is an instructive primer on what didn’t work, to wit: torture.
So, while we congratulate CIA analyst “John”, let us also remember that years of effort, centuries of founding principles and an eternity of American morality was lost to the Bush/Cheney torture brigade. Ever since Osama bin Laden’s take down, the torture apologists have come out of their caves bleating at full voice in a vain attempt to justify their war crimes and save their face. Even yesterday, as the nation celebrated its founding, one of the most craven torture toadies of all, Marc Theissen, was back at it, saying the country owed the torture freaks an apology.
But torture is not what caught Osama bin Laden, good solid human intelligence and analysis were what did the trick.
That ability to spot the importance of seemingly insignificant details, to weave disparate strands of information into a meaningful story, gave him a particular knack for hunting terrorists.
Yes. Around here, we call that digging and trolling in the weeds. It is what works; not torture.
The CIA would undoubtedly benefit from your talents EW, but I am enormously grateful that you employ them here, out in the open, for all of our benefit : )
Izzy Stone and Marcy Wheeler are better models for government investigators than Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. That is, if you want to get to the heart of the matter and not just enrich contractors and the executive’s power.
Goldman and Apuzzo talk about how quickly CIA analysts and executives changed jobs, citing as reasons burnout: “They become jaded. They start missing things.” They might have also inquired into how many CIA personnel “retired” to work in the private sector, doing the same or more important intel functions they were doing for the government, but with even less oversight and for considerably more money.
But, but Obama’s latest CIA troll says we need torture to deter the mushroom cloud scenario. And of course to be effective, we need continuing practice, don’t you know.
The pace at the CIA lost or moved analysts and executives also seems strange. I appreciate the burnout rate in high-pressure, life and death jobs involving angry, powerful politicians demanding convenient results. In days of yore, however, the DoJ, SEC, Customs and IRS kept top lawyers involved in high-profile antitrust, criminal, securities, customs and tax investigations for years. The IBM litigation took more than a decade; it took years to nail NY metro mafia bosses. Corporations keep investigatory, product and research teams intact for years, too. Ditto offshore. Which tells me the rationale proffered here does not fully explain the rapid turnover.
This guy is the hero, not OBamaLLP, BushCo or any of the Generals.
Boxturtle (But if he’d used torture, he’d already have his Medal of Freedom)
I myself am not convinced that any of this should be believed. “John” is portrayed as a brilliant analyst. But “John” was also part of the undeclared Robot Murder Drone War, that kills mostly innocent civilians. This suggests he is a major neo-con warmonger.
There are many questions that defy logic. Bin Laden was living near a Pakistan military installations for five years, and ISI did not know about him. But reports say that Bin Laden was actively planning and assisting ISI terrorism. I am thinking Bin Laden’s usefulness as the reason for the Phony War On Terrorism was no longer wanted or needed.
We have also had no information at all about Bin Laden financial networks that supported “Al Qaeda” terrorism. Bin Laden’s only real talent was financing terror.
There is one person, Dr. Steve Pieczenik, who claims Bin Laden died years ago, and this fellow seems to have credentials!
I did a survey on line before posting this and found little to either confirm or deny his claims.
I would appreciate any links to sources which amplify on his climes, pro or con.
Of course torture worked. It worked to produce false confessions that could at least be used to frighten the American people (and the people of other Western countries,) as well as to furnish arguments to claim that the authorities were doing their jobs. Those confessions also seemed to support the official 9/11 narrative.
we have a winner in aisle 9!
EW,
I think Michigan (Go Blue!) ought to offer a special course taught in their school of journalism called “Digging and trolling in the Weeds,” along with an endowed chair for your exclusive use.
Bob in AZ
Where would they find a qualified professor for that in Michigan? Oh, I see you have answered that!!
Mildly OT – Both related to bmaz’s post and EW’s latest tweet, currently 3 links now available:
Via NBC – Terror Suspect With Alleged Information About Al-Qaida Brought to NYC
Via Faux News – Terror Suspect Interrogated on Navy Ship for Two Months Arrives in U.S.
Via Matt Apuzzo at AP – Somali man brought to US to face terror trial
Latest via Pete Williams at MSNBC:
Sorry, just saw these links. Just posted on it.
No problemo!
More OT – It’s not just American drone wars:
Unlike technology, traditional analysis offers little opportunity for fat profits by crony contractors. So, it’s not surprising that we see less and less of it.
Years ago, I predicted that a certain government official would leave his job and that another official’s proposal–admired by one of my coworkers–would fail. The coworker initially scoffed, because he had worked more closely with the two officials and had greater entree to high-level officials. But, he relied on what they said; not how they said it and certainly not on the things that were left unsaid. He failed to notice the little things, like how high level officials stopped taking notes when one official began speaking. How the other officials signatures became increasing large and angry looking. When my predictions finally proved true, my coworker was shocked.
Like my coworker, technology relies on what is said or written. It’s terrible at understanding nuances of how something is said and confounded in terms of analyzing what isn’t said. And, very pricey contract for equipment or software…every Trailblazer….comes at the expense of hiring traditional, well-trained analysts.
Typo–That should read “every pricey contract…”
O/T Greenwald on leaks and Pakistan.
Major new leak investigation needed into Pakistan revelations
” There are, broadly speaking, three categories of political “leaks”: (1) ones that reflect well on the U.S. government and its allies (here’s the glorious leaked story of how the U.S. got bin Laden); (2) ones that reflect poorly on the U.S. government (U.S. officials are guilty of waste, corruption, illegality); and (3) ones that reflect poorly on foreign governments the U.S. wishes to demonize (Pakistan murdered a journalist). Obama’s highly selective war on whistleblowers is design to eliminate category (2) leaks — that’s what it’s been aimed at thus far . . .”
LINK.
Actually, the Goldman/Apuzzo story perpetuates the myth that the hunt for Bin Laden went on since 9/11, and I’m sorry to see you perpetuate it as well.
As Jason Leopold and I have documented, and was verified by a 2008 DoD IG report declassified last year, the tracking of Bin Laden goes back to at least the late 1990s. In fact, intelligence analysts for the military’s Joint Forces Intelligence Command (Asymmetrical Threats Division) believed they had tracked down Bin Laden, utilizing a “fusion” approach. Captain Kirk von Ackermann in particular felt that he had identified where Bin Laden was, but according to his wife, there was not “political will” to go after Bin Laden at that time. By 2000 (or early 2001), the analysts were told not to track Bin Laden anymore.
We know this because the former Deputy Head (later Acting Head) of the Asymmetric Threats Division came forward on this (1st to the IG, then later, frustrated by their cover-up, to Truthout, after TO had published the only major article on the IG report, which I also covered here at Firedoglake).
Interested readers who really want to know the history, and not just CIA after-the-fact get-the-glory propaganda, can read all about it here, here, and here.
Susie Dow, of ePluribus Media, has also picked up the coverage at her own blog. It is a great disappointment that the story has not found its legs elsewhere, but I will continue to be writing about it and expanding the coverage of it.
Two major questions follow from this:
1) Why were military intelligence officers called off the hunt for Bin Laden even after they believed they had produced excellent intel on where he was circa 2000?
2) Why did JFIC lie to Congressional investigators (and DIA also cover up documentation of the Aysmmetrical Threats Division work) when Congress came asking questions as part of the 2002 Joint Intelligence Committees investigation of the lead-up to 9/11?
To report the story that AP does, without reporting the context around the approach to the intelligence work done on locating Osama Bin Laden, is to misrepresent the history of that work, and our understanding of why it detoured into the horrific byways of torture, as it did.
Neither this post, nor the story of Goldman and Apuzzo has anything in the least to do with your or Leopold’s story. And it does nothing to contradict, whether facially or superficially, the thought that the realization of, or hunt for, bin Laden started in the late 90s with Clinton. I have no clue where this false outrage is coming from, but it is bogus.
bmaz,
I think you’re over-reacting, perhaps over-protective of EW. She can defend her own work very well, without your assistance. And this is Jeff Kaye you’re responding to, not some troll from an unknown universe.
I appreciated Jeff’s comment as providing a good back-story for what EW wrote, and relevant to EW’s headline theme on “finding Bin Laden.”
You got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?
Bob in AZ
Nope, I fully meant what I said; I do not think the “Iron Man” stuff is directly relevant or germane to a discussion of Goldman’s story, nor do I think it undercuts it. I was not defending EW, I was simply stating that Goldman’s story, for whatever value it has, is not effectively attacked from a collateral posture from “Iron Man”.
When a post reads, “Bin Laden Found by Trolling the Weeds, Not by Torture,” and a recent report details how Bin Laden was found a year before 9/11 by “trolling the weeds,” and that fact was briefed to the CIA, then it was all covered up when Congress came asking, consciously so by the lead military command, then I think it is relevant. The cover-up continued by the DoD Inspector General for Intelligence, and I will be writing more on that presently.
One can disagree, of course. And you do, evidently.
The children of the man who found Bin Laden in 2000 might not ever know what their father had done, if IM had not come forward. (He went missing mysteriously in Iraq, where he was working as a contractor in 2003.) And we still are in the dark as to why that operation was shut down, or why Bin Laden was not pursued at that time. Important? Obviously, that’s up to the reading public to decide.
Furthermore, bmaz, if my point about the revisionist history of the hunt for Bin Laden, as exemplified by the AP article, weren’t directly relevant, consider the way this “hunt” is already referenced in, for instance, the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings (a href=”http://intelligence.senate.gov/110623/prehearing.pdf”>PDF) of Gen. Petraeus for CIA director (Bold emphasis added)
I am totally correct in challenging this revisionist history. And I think it’s relevant to ask why this revisionism to begin with.
bmaz@21
What I inferred from Jeff Kaye’s comment @ 20 was that Bushcheney did not heed the Clinton warnings about the threat from al Qa’ida . The other inference could be that Bushcheney by not acknowledging the threat posed by ‘the Base” furthered the likely success for the attacks on the Twin Towers . When you think about why the search for the Sheikh was called off – one must also think about Richard C Clarke runnnig around the Bushcheney White house ” with his hair on fire ” warning of an immeninent terrorist attack ” .
Its still very troubling to me that Bushcheney chose not to vigorously pursue UBL – then we wind up with Camp Nama after the GWOT is instituted .
Actually, so far as I can tell, the pushback on the Bin Laden information came in the late summer/early fall of 2000. The full shutdown of the operation may not have occurred until early 2001. This was not, so far as I can tell, a Bush/Cheney operation, but emanated from the Pentagon, and possibly the IC.
My “outrage” begins when you consider that the CIA was briefed on the DO5-JFIC intelligence during 2000, as I have elsewhere documented, as was DIA and NSA, and USJFCOM higher-ups as well. Hence, the story being put out about “John” smacks of a cover story. I nice cover story, but certainly not the real goodies about what went on. It may be nice to think that there was this bulldog who pursued what he thought was a good way to find Bin Laden, but that dog won’t hunt. — It was Goldman and Apuzzo’s essentially uncritical reporting of what their sources told them that rankled me. And I know they know about the Iron Man story, so they can’t plead ignorance, but choose to prefer the CIA’s own version of events.
The further “outrage” comes when you consider that the U.S. press and blogosphere has ignored the story of a man who was actually there, who was pursuing Al Qaeda couriers to Bin Laden before 9/11, for instance, and who has risked his career, I would think, to come forward in the name of truth, to reveal that operations were shut down, and lies told about this to Congress, while the respectable crowd continues to lap up uncritically what the CIA chooses to tell it.
Meanwhile, there will be more to report on that history, and I will report it as it comes in.
Wonderful.
And congrats to the CIA group.