Adjusting The Message

For a long time now, Republicans have been screaming that Democrats are weak on national security and terrorism.  The truth is that Republicans are the party of failure on these issues, no failure larger than 9/11.  Yet they were allowed to get away with claiming they were the only choice if you wanted to avoid having your family killed in their sleep by terrorists, when 3,000 Americans died on Bush's watch.

Now that President Obama has cleaned up Bush's mess on OBL, Republicans are scrambling to keep this silly narrative alive by trying to find any way to credit Bush for Osama's death.  The latest method?  Bush's "enhanced interrogation" gave us the lead we needed to get Osama, so Bush and Republicans get 100% of the credit. 

Only one problem:  it's complete crap.  The deputy national security advisor, John Brennan, admits as much.

White House deputy national security advisor John Brennan Tuesday knocked down the myth that waterboarding provided crucial intelligence that led to the location of Osama bin Laden.

“So we’ve been talking about the different details and methods that lead up to this moment, and obviously there is word out today that waterboarding played a very big role or role in actually getting the information,” MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski told Brennan. “Is that the case?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Brennan explained.

“The information that was acquired over the course of nine years or so came from many different sources, human sources, technical sources, as well as information that detainees provided, and it was something that as a result of the painstaking work that the analysts did, they pieced it all together that led us to the Abbottabad compound and led us to the successful operation on Sunday,” he added.

Independently, Marcy Wheeler's timeline of the events involving Khalid Sheik Muhammad giving up the name of the courier confirms Brennan's story.

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.

With al-Libi, the connection between whatever torture he experienced and this intelligence is less clear (since he was first detained in 2005), but even with al-Libi, it appears clear he either never revealed the courier’s real name or only did so after he had been in custody for a year, and almost certainly until after he arrived in Gitmo.

Either way,  waterboarding didn't get us the courier...and when we did have the courier's identity in 2007, the Bush administration didn't follow up on it.  It took President Obama's refocusing on getting OBL to turn the courier information into actionable intelligence.

Once again, Republicans dropped the ball on national security.  After Sunday, they should be dismissed out of hand on the subject.  Period.  Republicans strong on national security?  That needs a rewrite.