“[Enhanced interrogation techniques] did not advance our war and counter-terrorism efforts - they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all.”
--President Obama, 5.21.09
Well, maybe enhanced interrogation did help, after all. Intelligence sources report that two terrorists subject to enhanced interrogation, Khalid Sheik Mohammad and Abu Faraj al Libbi, in effect confirmed the identity of the courier who led the CIA to Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan safehouse. They did so when both strongly denied knowing the courier, after lower-level al Qaeda terrorists had already identified him as very close to Osama. It took six more years, but the trail began with Bush’s enhanced interrogation. We are rid of Osama thanks to the actions of two administrations, and the use of techniques by the first later renounced by the second.
Obama has acknowledged that Osama’s death completes a task begun under his predecessor, but he is unlikely to admit—ever—that Bush was right to have authorized the enhanced interrogation that helped lead to Osama’s death. Let’s be clear. Obama got Osama, and deserves the major credit for doing so. In that sense, the story of how we got Osama is not comparable to the sad story of how President Nixon, following our successful moon landing in 1969, completely ignored President Kennedy’s 1961 pledge that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth." Parallels between Kennedy/Nixon and Bush/Obama, but not the same.
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