UNEXPLAINED DISPUTES
It’s curious that the source chooses to emphasize the fundamental
disagreement over whether the raid was a good idea. Presumably, there
was a purpose in emphasizing this, but the New Yorker’s “tick-tock”,
which is very light on analysis or context, doesn’t tell us what it
was. It may have been intended to show Obama as brave, inclined toward
big risks (thereby running counter to his reputation)—we can only guess.
[18]This
internal discord will get the attention of anyone who remembers all the
assertions from intelligence officials over the years that bin Laden
was almost certainly already dead—either of natural causes or killed at
some previous time.
Here’s a bit more from The New Yorker on officials’ doubts going into the raid:
Several analysts from the National Counterterrorism
Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.’s analysis; their confidence
in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty per cent. The
center’s director, Michael Leiter, said that it would be preferable to
wait for stronger confirmation of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.
Those doubts are particularly interesting for several reasons: the
CIA has had a long history of disputes between its covert action wing,
which tends to advocate activity, and its analysis section, historically
prone to caution. The action wing also has a history of publicizing its
being right—when it could purport to be right—and covering up its
failures. So when an insider chooses to make public these disagreements,
we should be willing to consider motives.
This dispute can also be seen as an intriguing prologue to the rush
to dump Bin Laden’s body and not provide proof to the public that it was
indeed bin Laden. What if it wasn’t bin Laden that they killed? Would the government announce that after such a high-stakes operation? (“While we thought he’d be there, we accidentally killed someone else instead”? Seems unlikely.)
Now, let us go to the next antechamber of this warren of shadowy entities and unstated agendas.
[19]Who
exactly wanted bin Laden shot rather than taken alive and
interrogated—and why? There’s been much discussion about the purported
reasons for terminating him on sight, but the fact remains that he would
have been a source of tremendous intelligence of real value to the
safety of Americans and others.
Yet, early in the piece, Schmidle writes:
If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden’s guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.
That was the plan? Whose plan? We’ve never been explicitly told by
the White House that such a decision had been made. In fact, we’d
previously been informed that the president was glad to have the master
plotter taken alive if he was unarmed and did not resist. So, that’s a
huge and problematical discrepancy that is only heightened by Schmidle’s
misleadingly matter-of-fact treatment of the matter.
GET ME RIYADH
If the justification for killing Osama presented in The New Yorker warrants concern, the account of how—and why—they disposed of his body ought to send alarm bells clanging.
At the time of the raid, the decision to hastily dump Osama’s body in
the ocean rather than make it available for authoritative forensic
examination was a highly controversial one—that only led to more
speculation that the White House was hiding something. The
justifications, including not wanting to bury him on land for fear of
creating a shrine, were almost laughable.
So what do we learn about this from The New Yorker? It’s truly bizarre: the SEALS themselves
made the decision. That’s strange enough. But then we learn that
Brennan took it upon himself to verify that was the right decision. How
did he do this? Not by speaking with the president or top military,
diplomatic or legal brass. No, he called some foreigners—get ready–the Saudis, who told him that dumping at sea sounded like a good plan.
Here’s Schmidle’s account:
All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden’s corpse into the sea—a
blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth. They had successfully pulled
off a similar scheme before. During a DEVGRU helicopter raid inside
Somalia in September, 2009, SEALs had killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one
of East Africa’s top Al Qaeda leaders; Nabhan’s corpse was then flown
to a ship in the Indian Ocean, given proper Muslim rites, and thrown
overboard. Before taking that step for bin Laden, however, John Brennan
made a call. Brennan, who had been a C.I.A. station chief in
Riyadh, phoned a former counterpart in Saudi intelligence. Brennan told
the man what had occurred in Abbottabad and informed him of the plan to
deposit bin Laden’s remains at sea. As Brennan knew, bin
Laden’s relatives were still a prominent family in the Kingdom, and
Osama had once been a Saudi citizen. Did the Saudi government have any
interest in taking the body? “Your plan sounds like a good one,” the Saudi replied.
Let’s consider this. The most wanted man in the world; substantive
professional doubts about whether the man in the Abbottabad house is
him; tremendous public doubts about whether it could even be him; the
most important operation of the Obama presidency; yet the decision about
what to do with the body is left to low-level operatives. Keep
in mind SEALs are trained to follow orders given by others. They’re
expected to apply what they know to unexpected scenarios that come up,
but the key strategic decisions— arrived at in advance—are not theirs to
make.
Even more strange that Brennan would discuss this with a foreign
power. And not just any foreign power, but the regime that is
inextricably linked with the domestically-influential family of bin
Laden—and home to many of the hijackers who worked for him.
Is it just me, or does this sound preposterous? Obama’s Homeland
Security and Counterterrorism adviser is just winging it with key
aspects of one of America’s most important, complex and risky
operations? And the Saudi government is the one deciding to discard the
remains of a man from one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful families,
before the public could receive proper proof of the identity of the
body? A regime with a great deal at stake and perhaps plenty to hide.
Also please consider this important caveat: As we noted in a previous [12] article, the claim that the body had already been positively identified via DNA has been disputed by a DNA expert who said that insufficient time had elapsed before the sea burial to complete such tests.
[20]The
line about Brennan himself having been a former CIA station chief in
Saudi Arabia is just sort of dropped in there. No recognition of what it
means that a person of that background was put into that position after
9/11, no recognition that a person of that background and those fraught
personal connections is controlling this narrative. He’s not just a
“counterterrorism expert”—he is a longtime member of an agency whose
mandate includes the frequent use of disinformation. And one who has his
own historic direct links to the Saudi regime, a key and problematical
player in the larger chess game playing out.
[21]It’s
relevant to note that Brennan is not only a career CIA officer (they
say no one ever really leaves the Agency, no matter their new title) but
one with a lot of baggage. He was deputy director of the CIA at the
time of the 9/11 attacks. He was an adviser to Obama’s presidential
campaign, after which Obama initially planned to name him CIA director.
That appointment was pulled, in part due to criticism from human rights
advocates over statements he had made in support of sending terrorism
suspects to countries where they might be tortured.
Of course, there could have been other sources besides Brennan. In
addition to the unnamed “counterterrorism official” previously cited,
the New Yorker mentions a “special operations officer,” as in:
…according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid.
Subsequent quotes from him indicate that this had to be a supervisory special ops officer. His comments are surprising:
“This wasn’t a hard op,” the special-operations officer
told me. “It would be like hitting a target in McLean”—the upscale
Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.
Whoops! Here’s a Special Ops guy saying the Special Ops raid was
actually no big deal! Shouldn’t that, if a valid assessment, get more
attention? Especially given the endless praise and frequent statements
of how difficult the operation was. I mean, the toughness and diciness
of the Abbottabad mission is the prime reason we want to read the New Yorker’s account in the first place!
To further underline the point, consider that this fellow is not alone in his assessment:
In the months after the raid, the media have
frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as
Operation Eagle Claw and the “Black Hawk Down” incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that “this was not one of three missions.”…. He likened the routine of evening raids to “mowing the lawn.”
Why would a person overseeing an operation like this deflate the
bubble of adoration? It doesn’t seem helpful to the interests of Special
Operations – and it doesn’t seem credible, either. So there’s presumably a reason that this person is—again speaking to The New Yorker after
this important exclusive has been carefully considered and strategized.
We just don’t know what it is, and the magazine doesn’t even bother to
wonder.
Most of the other sources seem to play bit roles. One is “a senior
adviser to the President” whose only comment is that Obama decided not
to trust the Pakistanis with advance notice of the raid—which we already
knew. Another— named—source is Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security
adviser, who does not evince any intimate knowledge of the raid itself.
The New Yorker also includes a few other officials who brief
Schmidle on general background, like a “senior defense department
official” explaining the overall relationship between Special Operations
and CIA personnel, and a named former CIA counsel explaining that the
Abottabad raid amounted to “a complete incorporation of JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] into a C.I.A. operation.”
That’s only slipped into the article, but it is perhaps one of the
most important aspects of the piece, along with a brief mention of the
way in which former Iraq/Afghan commander General David Petraeus
has gone to CIA while CIA director Panetta has been made Defense
Secretary. (For more on these important but confusing games of
high-level musical chairs, which were not deeply scrutinized in the
conventional media, see our WhoWhatWhy pieces here [22] and here [23].)
This may sound too technical for your taste, but the takeaway point
is that fundamental realignments are afoot in that vast,
massively-funded, powerful and secretive part of the US government that
is treated by the corporate press almost as if it does
not exist. The tales of internal intrigue that we do not hear would
begin to provide us with the real narratives that are not ours to have.
In the New Yorker piece, we do learn lots of things we did
not know before—for example, that Special Ops considered tunneling in or
coming in by foot rather than helicopter. We learn that CIA director
Robert Gates wanted to drop massive bombs on the house. General James
Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared that
view—Cartwright is one of the few who is directly identified as a source
for Schmidle. That’s important stuff, and worth more than brief
mention. And, once again, we need more effort to try and understand why
we are being told these things.[24]
“WE REALLY DIDN’T KNOW…WHAT WAS GOING ON”
About two-thirds of the article is a sort of scene-setter, a prologue
to on-the-ground story we’ve all been waiting for. But when the big
moment arrives, The New Yorker’s Schmidle instead punts:
Meanwhile, James, the squadron commander, had breached
one wall, crossed a section of the yard covered with trellises, breached
a second wall, and joined up with the SEALs from helo one, who were
entering the ground floor of the house. What happened next is
not precisely clear. “I can tell you that there was a time period of
almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn’t know just
exactly what was going on,” Panetta said later, on “PBS NewsHour.”
Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of
defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone’s
video feed. The SEALs were not wearing helmet cams,
contrary to a widely cited report by CBS. None of them had any previous
knowledge of the house’s floor plan, and they were further jostled by
the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the
costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollections—on which this account is based—may be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute.
Schmidle claims that the SEALs’ “recollections—on which this account
is based”—are subject to dispute. But as I’ve noted, the article is NOT
based on their recollections, but on what some source claims to
Schmidle were their recollections. Why the summary may be imprecise and
thus subject to dispute after it has been filtered by a person
controlling the scenario, must be asked. Perhaps this is why The New Yorker is not permitted to speak directly to the SEALs—because of what they could tell the magazine.
Now, killing the men who lived in the compound: First, the SEALs shot
and killed the courier, who they say was armed, and his wife, who they
say was not, when they emerged from the guesthouse. Then they killed the
courier’s brother inside the main house, who they say was armed. Then
they moved up the stairs:
..three SEALs marched up the stairs. Midway up, they saw
bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, craning his neck around
the corner. He then appeared at the top of the staircase with an AK-47. Khalid, who wore a white T-shirt with an overstretched neckline and had short hair and a clipped beard, fired down at the Americans. (The counterterrorism official claims that Khalid was unarmed,
though still a threat worth taking seriously. “You have an adult male,
late at night, in the dark, coming down the stairs at you in an Al Qaeda
house—your assumption is that you’re encountering a hostile.”) At least
two of the SEALs shot back and killed Khalid.
Ok, that’s pretty strange. First, Schmidle asserts that Khalid bin
Laden was armed and fired with an AK-47. Then he quotes the
“counterterrorism official” saying that Khalid was unarmed. Why does The New Yorker
first run the “Khalid was armed” claim as a fact, and then include
Brennan’s disclaimer? What’s really going on here, even from the New Yorker’s editorial standpoint?
Here’s another such instance: a dispute over where Osama was when they first saw him:
Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid’s body and blew open
another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third
floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On
the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision
goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard
was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away. The SEAL instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft [codename for Osama]. (The counterterrorism official asserts that the SEAL first saw bin Laden on the landing, and fired but missed.)
What’s the purpose of all this? How good is intelligence work when
they can’t reconstruct whether the singular focus of the operation was
first spotted peeking out from a doorway, or standing on the landing
above them?
And then one of the most interesting passages, about the kill:
A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the
infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who
was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he
was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,”
the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains
that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken
alive.)
Uh-oh. So who is this Special Operations officer? He is directly
disputing the administration’s claim on what surely matters greatly—what
were President Obama’s intentions here? And did they always plan to
just ignore them? That The New Yorker just drops this in with no further analysis or context is, simply put, shocking.
It seems almost as if Panetta, Obama, and the people in the story who
most closely approximate actual representatives of the public in a
functioning democracy, were basically cut off from observing what went
down that day—or from influencing what transpired.
Consider this statement from Panetta, not included in the New Yorker piece:
“Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you
that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really
didn’t know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very
tense moments as we were waiting for information.
“We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have
direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation
itself as they were going through the compound.”
Panetta’s “lost 25 minutes” needs to be seen in the context of a man
with civilian roots, notwithstanding two mid-60s years as a Lt. in
military intel: Former Congressman, Clinton White House budget chief and
Chief of Staff, credentials with civil rights and environment
movements—a fellow with real distance from the true spook/military mojo.
Taken together, here’s what we have: President Obama did not know
exactly what was going on. He did not decide that bin Laden should be
shot. And he did not decide to dump his body in the ocean. The CIA and
its Special Ops allies made all the decisions.
Then Brennan, the CIA’s man, put out the version that CIA wanted.
(Keep in mind that, as noted earlier, CIA was really running the
operation—with Special Ops under its direction).
What we’re looking at, folks, is the reality of democracy in America:
A permanent entrenched covert establishment that marches to its own
drummer or to drummers unknown. It’s exactly the kind of thing that
never gets reported. Too scary. Too real. Better to dismiss this line of
inquiry as too “conspiracy theory.”
If that sounds like hyperbole, let me add this rather significant
consideration. It is the background of Nicholas Schmidle, the freelancer
who wrote the New Yorker piece. It may give us insight into
how he landed this extraordinary exclusive on this extraordinarily
sensitive matter—information again, significantly, not shared by The New Yorker with its readers:
[25]Schmidle’s
father is Marine Lt. General Robert E. “Rooster” Schmidle Jr. General
Schmidle served as Commanding Officer of Special Purpose Marine
Air-Ground Task Force (Experimental)—that’s essentially Special
Operations akin to Navy SEALs. In recent years, he was “assistant deputy
commandant for Programs and Resources (Programs)”—where, among other
things, he oversaw “irregular warfare.” (See various, including contract
specs here [26] on “Special Operations,” and picture caption here [27])
In 2010, he moved into another piece of this, when Obama appointed him
deputy commander, U.S. Cyber Command. Cumulatively, this makes the
author’s father a very important man in precisely the sort of circles
who care how the raid is publicly portrayed—and who would be quite
intimate with some of the folks hunkering down with Obama in the
Situation Room on the big day.
[28]You can see a photo [29] of Gen. Schmidle on a 2010 panel [30] about “Warring Futures.” Event co-sponsors include Slate magazine and the New America Foundation, both of which, according to Nicholas Schmidle’s website [31], have also provided Schmidle’s son with an ongoing perch (with Slate giving
him a platform for numerous articles from war zones and the foundation
employing him as a Fellow.) These parallel relationships grow more
disturbing with contemplation.
So let’s get back to the question, Who is driving this Ship of State?
First, consider this passage:
Obama returned to the White House at two o’clock, after playing nine holes of golf
at Andrews Air Force Base. The Black Hawks departed from Jalalabad
thirty minutes later. Just before four o’clock, Panetta announced to the
group in the Situation Room that the helicopters were approaching
Abbottabad.
[32]To
be really useful reporting here, rather than just meaningless “color”,
we’d need some context. Was the golf game’s purpose to blow off steam at
an especially tense time? Did Obama not think it important enough for
him to be constantly present in the hours leading up to the raid? Is
this typical of his schedule when huge things are happening? We
desperately need a more realistic sense of what presidents do, how much
they’re really in charge, or, instead, figureheads for unnamed
individuals who make most of the critical decisions.
Here’s something just as strange: we are told the President took a
commanding role in determining key operational tactics, but then didn’t
seem interested in important details, after the fact.
Forty-five minutes after the Black Hawks departed, four
MH-47 Chinooks launched from the same runway in Jalalabad. Two of them
flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side; the other two proceeded
into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute
decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel
assured that the Americans could “fight their way out of Pakistan.”
[33]Now, consider the following climactic New Yorker account
of Obama meeting with the squadron commander after it’s all over, with
bin Laden dead and the troops home and safe. Schmidle decides to call
the commander “James…the names of all the covert operators mentioned in
this story have been changed.” The anecdote will feature a canine, one
who, in true furry dog story fashion, had already been introduced early
in the New Yorker piece, as “Cairo” (it’s not clear whether the dog’s name, too, was changed):
As James talked about the raid, he mentioned Cairo’s
role. “There was a dog?” Obama interrupted. James nodded and said that
Cairo was in an adjoining room, muzzled, at the request of the Secret
Service.
“I want to meet that dog,” Obama said.
“If you want to meet the dog, Mr. President, I advise you to bring
treats,” James joked. Obama went over to pet Cairo, but the dog’s muzzle
was left on.
Here’s the ending:
Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.
Why did the president not want to ask for specifics on the most
important parts of the operation—but seemed so interested in a dog that
participated? While it is certainly plausible that this happened, we
should be wary of one of the oldest p.r. tricks around—get people cooing
over an animal, while the real action is elsewhere.
Certainly, Obama’s reaction differs dramatically from that of other
previous presidents who always demanded detailed briefings and would
have stayed on top of it all throughout—including fellow Democrats JFK,
Carter and Clinton. At minimum, it shows a degree of caution or ceremony
based upon a desire not to know too much—or an understanding that he
may not ask. Does anyone doubt that Bill Clinton would have been on
watch 24/7 during this operation, parsing legal, political and
operational details throughout, and would have demanded to know who
felled America’s most wanted?
Summing up about the reliability of this account, which is now likely
to become required reading for every student in America, long into the
future:
•It is based on reporting by a man who fails to disclose that he
never spoke to the people who conducted the raid, or that his father has
a long background himself running such operations (this even suggests
the possibility that Nicholas Schmidle’s own father could have been one
of those “unnamed sources.”)
•It seems to have depended heavily on trusting second-hand accounts
by people with a poor track record for accurate summations, and an
incentive to spin.
•The alleged decisions on killing bin Laden and disposing of his body lack credibility.
•The DNA evidence that the SEALs actually got their man is questionable.
•Though certain members of Congress say they have seen photos of the body (or, to be precise, a body), the rest of us have not seen anything.
•Promised photos of the ceremonial dumping of the body at sea have not materialized.
•The eyewitnesses from the house—including the surviving wives—have disappeared without comment.
We weren’t allowed to hear from the raid participants. And on August
6, seventeen Navy SEALs died when their helicopter was shot down in
Afghanistan. We’re told that fifteen of them came, amazingly, from the
same SEAL Team 6 that carried out the Abbottabad raid—but that none of
the dead were present for the raid. We do get to hear the stories of
those men, and their names [34].
Of course, if any of those men had been in the Abbottabad
raid—or knew anything about it of broad public interest, we’d be none
the wiser—because, the only “reliable sources” still available (and
featured by the New Yorker) are military and intelligence professionals, coming out of a long tradition of cover-ups and fabrications.
Meanwhile, we have this president, this one who according to the
magazine article didn’t ask about the core issues—why this man was
killed, who killed him, under whose orders, what would be done with the
body.
Well, he may not want answers. But we ought to want them. Otherwise, it’s all just a game.
