CIA’s Hunt for bin Laden

Netflix’s recent documentary, “American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden,” features CIA and National Security players from that era who inadvertently expose CIA’s institutional incompetence. As one Congressman said “the truth is we have an intelligence network that is so dumb they could throw themselves at the ground and miss.” Clips and comments in the post.

Preamble

The three-part documentary is worth watching. It features well-known players from CIA’s failed “Global War on Terror”; and CIA’s inability to prevent 9/11 and its long hunt for Osama bin Laden. For example, John Brennan, John McLaughlin, Michael Morrell, Cofer Black, Henry Crumpton, and Gary Berntsen. Despite their attempts to misdirect, justify, amplify, avoid, or downplay past events and activities during their interviews with Netflix, they were responsible for, inter alia, the murder of thousands of civilians in drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq; torture at CIA black sites and Guantánamo Bay; and violations of the civil liberties of U.S. Citizens.

The arrogance displayed by Cofer Black and Gary Berntsen is evident. Congressman James Traficant (d. 2014) was right:  “The truth is we have an intelligence network that is so dumb they could throw themselves at the ground and miss.” But they are expert at cockiness and arrogance.

CIA Counterterrorism Center (CTC)

CIA’s CTC, viz., Alec Station, which was responsible for tracking bin Laden and al-Qaida (AQ) before 9/11, failed miserably. They refused to share intelligence with FBI. This failure is well-documented in Lawrence Wright’s book, The Looming Tower.

Tracy Walder, CIA/CTC, is an example of CIA’s abysmal hiring practices. She was a sorority sister; her leadership of the sorority, she says, “spoke to my moral turpitude,” which led CIA to hire her! Leading a sorority? “Moral turpitude”: a Freudian slip? Or is Walder a “bimbette”? Clearly she has no idea what “turpitude” means, nor the import of the term, “moral turpitude.”

Torture Program

CIA used torture to extract information on bin Laden. Gina Haspel, CIA’s “torturer-in-chief” and Director under Trump, is not named in the documentary. However, CIA’s program is discussed (in brief). I have linked an excerpt from The New York Times’s report on the torture program.

Ali Soufan, who served in the FBI, quit because he objected to torture, which he states yielded little intelligence of value, but which compromised the moral authority of the United States. CIA also lost staff who had moral objections to torture and mass killings by drones.

CIA Incompetence: Camp Chapman Edition

One of my favorite episodes from CIA’s long running series on incompetence is the suicide bombing at Camp Chapman, 30 Dec 2009, that killed seven CIA officers and contractors, an Afghan, and a member of Jordanian intelligence (GID). This episode was highlighted in Zero Dark Thirty.

I was in Tehran during the event, and recall reading the news online about how a GID asset, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, had duped GID and CIA, and become a suicide bomber. I said to myself, “CIA got played by GID and AQ”; further, that CIA officers had not practiced tradecraft or followed security protocols. I was right. al-Balawi’s vehicle was allowed inside Camp Chapman without being searched. CIA personnel interviewed for the documentary try to cast the incident and CIA in better light, but the CIA officers in Khost, in plain English, “f*cked up.” The CIA officers earned their stars on the Memorial Wall—as well as their Darwin Awards!