GRASPING FOR STRAWS: WHY THE RIGHT'S CLAIM THAT “TORTURE GOT US BIN LADEN” IS DISINGENUOUS AND UNDERMINES OUR SECURITY

by Joe Pace

There is something surreal about the way some conservatives have seized on the death of Osama bin Laden as evidence that “torture works.” The claim rests on the assumption (for which evidence is ambiguous, at best) that, sometime circa 2004, detainees were water-boarded – tortured -- into giving up the nickname of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted courier. Then the nickname, plus innumerable other leads were placed into the intelligence cycle, which churned for some seven years before Osama bin Laden was found and felled.

OF PHOTOJOURNALISM, BIN LADEN, AND THE "RIGHT TO SEE”

A few days ago, the journalist Sebastian Junger visited West Point, where I am on the history faculty. He was there to show Restrepo, his documentary film about a U.S. Army combat team deployed on a dangerous assignment in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, and then do an on-stage interview with me in front of an audience of cadets and members of the general public. When it was planned many months ago, Junger was to have been joined by Tim Hetherington, a photojournalist who was Junger’s equal partner in the making of this film (they were co-directors), but two weeks before their appointed visit to West Point this month, Hetherington was killed by a mortar while covering the Libyan civil war near the city of Misrata. He was one of two cameramen who died in the attack. The other was Chris Hondros of Getty Images. Junger came to West Point anyway, and among the reasons he cited for not cancelling was the feeling that an audience composed of soldiers and would-be soldiers was precisely the kind of place where he should be as he coped with his grief.

PJP PARTICIPANT JEFF GREENFIELD IMAGINES: WHAT IF WE HAD CAPTURED -- NOT KILLED -- OSAMA BIN LADEN AND THEN TRIED HIM IN THE FEDERAL COURTS?

In a fanciful, but compelling, column for the Washington Post, PJP Participant Jeff Greenfield, a former network news correspondent for CBS and ABC, fantasies over what could have transpired if the Navy SEALS had captured the al Qaeda leader. His discussion touches on a lot of tantalizing topics. For instance, if bin Laden had surrendered to the SEALS, wouldn't the rules of engagement have forced them to take him live? If he was then brought to the US for trial in a federal court, would his prosecution be hampered by the inadmissibility of evidence achieved through so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques"? What if his capture and trial led to a rash of terrorist acts, including the taking of hostages, held on the demand that he be freed? In short, Greenfield seems almost to suggest that the SEALS and the Obama Administration were lucky that bin Laden resisted -- assuming that this detail is true -- and was then killed for the capture and trial could have triggered a disastrous series of events that might have strengthened, not diminished, bin Laden's appeal as a heroic figure among radical Muslims.

THE MAN WHO DESIGNED AND SUPERVISED THE BIN LADEN RAID

The operation that killed Osama Bin Laden was carried out by an elite unit of the Navy SEALs and it is highly unlikely that we will ever learn the names of those who entered the compound, much less the SEAL who pulled the trigger twice to shoot Bin Laden dead. But we do know quite a bit about the man who designed and supervised the operation, Vice Admiral William H. McRaven.

While the CIA was responsible for tracking Bin Laden to the Abbottabad, Pakistan neighborhood where he had been hiding for years, once President Obama decided to launch the raid, Leon Panetta, the CIA Chief, turned the operation over to McRaven, a formed SEAL himself, who was positioned at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan for the raid.

Five Questions to Ask About the Killing of Bin Laden

1. Why not capture him?

In fact, the administration says the plan was to capture Bin Laden if he did not offer any resistance, though officials considered it unlikely that he would give himself up. Still, the question is tantalizing: if he had not offered resistance and the Seals had taken him alive and brought him into custody, what would be the plan going forward? Like Kahlid Sheik Mohammed, who is the acknowledged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, he would have to be incarcerated somewhere – Guantanamo? The very place that Obama promised to close? – and, again, like Kahlid Sheik Mohammed, put on trial. Only last month, the Obama administration made the decision to cease plans to try Mohammed in civil courts and proceed instead with a trial before a military commission as outlined in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. One of the reasons was that it was impossible to find a suitable venue. New York City, where the attacks were carried out, did not want the trial since it would no doubt have been a challenge to provide security. If there were security challenges for a trial of Mohammed, imagine the security challenges to a trial for Bin Laden.