Detective Work on Courier Led to Breakthrough on Bin Laden

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

WASHINGTON — After years of dead ends and promising leads gone cold, the big break came last August.

A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden’s whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier.

What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence work, culminating in a helicopter assault by American military and intelligence operatives that ended in the death of Bin Laden on Sunday and concluded one of history’s most extensive and frustrating manhunts.

American officials said that Bin Laden was shot in the head after he tried to resist the assault force, and that one of his sons died with him.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/02reconstruct-capture-osama-bin-laden.html

---

http://www.drudge.com/news/143824/breakthrough-led-bin-laden

found this story there

[jwirr]

1. Several days ago there was a OP on DU that talked about the

son being killed. At the time it was just of interest and never assumed there was more to the story.

[elleng]

2. About gaddafi's son, wasn't it?

[jwirr]

4. Yes, you are right and my bad.

[Roland99]

3. Rather detailed article for so soon after the event.

[damntexdem]

5. Yeah, and all the waterboarding, other torture, and "24" scenarios turned up what?

Funny what a bit of old-fashioned detective work can do when done competently.

And how little RW incompetence can accomplish.

[VWolf]

6. Bingo n/t

[Rage for Order]

7. Apparently it gave the interrogators the courier's ID

From the article in the OP:

Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

American intelligence officials said Sunday night that they finally learned the courier’s real name four years ago, but that it took another two years for them to learn the general region where he operated.

[No Elephants]

11. A detainee gave a psuedonym. We don't know if that detainee gave it as a result of torture.

Geez, they had the real name for four years?

[The Backlash Cometh]

8. I think their is a push for misinformation to give "enhanced interrogation" the credit.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1013278

[DailyGrind]

9. Look again. The information on the courier came directly from Gitmo

So yeah, all that 24 stuff did turn up invaluable information.

[No Elephants]

12. Where does it say the psuedonym was obtained via torture?

Edit to change "info" to "psuedonym."

[DailyGrind]

15. It doesn't. I read today that it wasn't through "enhanced" methods, but later on

through traditional interrogations. Regardless, it was still in a facility (maybe not Gitmo but one of the others in Europe?) that a lot people have criticized.

Bottom line is there's a reason Obama backtracked on this issue, and good on him for doing so.

[underpants]

13. Daily Kos has a completre refudiation of this nonsense talking point

In other words, while the CIA may have learned the courier’s nickname earlier, they didn’t learn his true name until “four years ago”–so late 2006 at the earliest. And they didn’t learn where the courier operated until around 2009.

From these dates we can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.

Marcy reads the Cheney statement saying he "assumes" that torture led to bin Laden differently because he "admits he doesn’t know where the intelligence came from." She's spot on in pointing out that the failure of Cheney to take full credit for the torture policy he loves so much, and spent so much time propagandizing. She says, since he "can’t claim definitively that the intelligence came from it, is a pretty good tell that he can’t say it did." She also points out that Donald Rumsfeld, who would have every reason to crow that the policies he supported had a good outcome, will only go so far as to say the intelligence might have come from detainees at Guantanamo.

Note clearly that neither of these two endorsing the idea that the waterboarding of KSM nine years ago—all 183 incidents of it—led to the name and location of the courier, which current intelligence officials say they learned in the last four years. It's not even clear that KSM's interrogators were even interested then in obtaining information about the couriers. The timeline, and every report that says the specific information on the courier was obtained in recent years at Guantanamo make the KSM waterboarding story incredible.

Dick Cheney still says "We need to keep in place those policies that made it possible for us to succeed in this case," meaning torture. He's still wrong.



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/02/972427/-Waterboarding-did-not-reveal-OsamabinLadentrail

[Kelvin Mace]

10. Why are you linkimg to Drudge?

Why do you want to give that hack traffic for an NYT story?

[alp227]

14. Not Matt Drudge's site but rather a RETORT site

Matt Drudge's smear site: DrudgeReport.com
Drudge RETORT (a T, not P): Drudge.com

Got it now?