The death of Osama bin Laden on May 1st of this year has lead to an outpouring of media reaction. They have ranged from anger at the people that stood outside near Ground Zero and the White House for their callous celebrations of the murder of bin Laden to the strange re-appearance of some old hands from the Bush administration rushing to point out that the torture of foreign detainees somehow led the US directly to bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan.
One of the more egregious examples of the latter is an Op/Ed published by the Wall Street Journal today by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey. You may recall Mr. Mukasey followed possibly the worst Attorney General in the history of this country or that he famously could not declare torture to be unconstitutional. This was the man in charge of the Justice Department during the final tumultuous years of the Bush administration. He has been outspoken previous to this but the WSJ piece is particularly dreadful in just how full of torture propaganda it is. Here is the third paragraph:
Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included water boarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.
Mukasey is being deliberately selective with his information here. It’s true that KSM did eventually disclose the name of the courier US intelligence used to find bin Laden’s store house. However, this came about after the 183 times he was water boarded. Even so, the fact that KSM was tortured should not (as Glenn Greenwald has argued) have any sort of correlation to the fact that US intelligence received this information. This name could have just as easily come from normal interrogation methods had the CIA bothered to attempt them prior to simply torturing the subject. Mukasey can draw all the conclusions he wishes but that does not absolve the US government of its complicity in torture. Just in case, Mukaey drops in the unverifiable claim that torture led to the “disruption of follow-on plots,” as if this was the only way to do this. Another paragraph makes other interesting claims:
The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.
There are a few notable things here. One, Mukasey claims that “fewer than 100” detainees were ever put into this CIA program, but that one-third of that number were tortured. This would be a much higher number than that which the US government claims to have water-boarded. This no doubt includes those detainees who were simply picked up based on faulty intelligence and then tortured at GTMO or any of the other black sites. But it is interesting to note the former AG admitting that at least thirty people were tortured by the US government.
Mukasey’s propaganda does not end there. Next he goes after the Army Field Manual, as if its humane description of interrogation that the military must use is somehow harmful:
The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It's available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.
Mukasey’s disdain for legal methods of interrogation should seriously question his credentials on any of this. So should his bizarre assertion that because the AFM is “available on the Internet” and therefore shouldn’t be used any more. Wikileaks released thousands of military and diplomatic cables describing in detail the rendition and torture of detainees in the custody of the United States. Those disclosures were more damaging to the US perception of its intelligence gathering than posting the Army Field Manual.
Mukasey also scare-mongers about Miranda rights and the investigation by actual Attorney General Eric Holder into the CIA’s torture of detainees, arguing that these issues will “demoralize” the intelligence community. Only someone with a strict understanding of what the US government actually did would use such stark language after the murder of Osama bin Laden. That has generally been the case with most occupants of the previous administration. The logic has a sort of twisted sense. If they do not come out with a full-throated defense of the Bush torture regime, Americans might get the sense that they regret their actions. Therefore former officials like Mukasey feel they need to continuously propagandize about the illegal actions perpetrated by the CIA and military throughout the “War on Terror” lest consensus emerge that these techniques were uncivilized. Conflating the “value” of torture with the locating of bin Laden is just one more tool of such propagandists.
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