Two weeks ago, WikiLeaks released its so-called “Gitmo Files”—hundreds of pages of classified documents detailing intelligence that captured terrorists provided the United States. As I point out in this morning’s Washington Post, the documents WikiLeaks made public included a file on Abu Faraj al-Libi, one of several CIA detainees who helped lead the agency to Osama bin Laden’s courier. While it garnered little attention at the time, the Abu Faraj document WikiLeaks exposed contained explosive information that could very well have tipped off al Qaeda that the CIA was closing in on bin Laden.
The document says that Abu Faraj “reported on al-Qai’da’s methods for choosing and employing couriers, as well as preferred communications means” and described him as the “communications gateway” between bin Laden and his operatives in Pakistan. It states that “in July 2003, [Abu Faraj] received a letter from UBL’s designated courier” (to whom he referred by a false name, Abd al-Khaliq Jan) in which “UBL stated [Abu Faraj] would be the official messenger between UBL and others in Pakistan.” It continues that “in mid-April 2005, [Abu Faraj] began arranging for a store front to be used as a meeting place and drop point for messages he wanted to exchange” with bin Laden’s courier.
But the most damaging disclosure was this: in order to carry out his new responsibilities, “in mid-2003, [Abu Faraj] moved his family to Abbottabad, PK, and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar” up until his arrest in 2005. In other words, the WikiLeaks document exposed the fact that CIA detainees had linked bin Laden’s courier to Abbottabad, the city where bin Laden was killed one week ago.
If al Qaeda leaders had read this classified document before Navy SEALs reached bin Laden’s compound, the results could have been disastrous. The terrorists would have been alerted to the fact that the CIA was on the trail of bin Laden’s principal courier, and had made the connection between the courier, bin Laden, and Abbottabad, which could have blown the entire bin Laden operation.
Was it a mere coincidence that the bin Laden raid took place almost a week to the day after the release of the WikiLeaks documents? Or did U.S. officials move in to get bin Laden before al Qaeda had time to figure out that that the CIA had learned about the Abbottabad connection?
One thing is clear: WikiLeaks remains a menace to U.S. national security. Yet despite promises to take action to stop the group’s serial disclosures, the Obama administration has done virtually nothing to shut down WikiLeaks or bring its leaders to justice. It is far past time for the Obama administration to indict, arrest, and try Julian Assange. His unlawful dissemination of classified materials may have almost cost us Osama bin Laden. For this disclosure alone, Assange should be put away for life.
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Funny, that the author speaks of “hundreds of pages of classified documents detailing intelligence that captured terrorists provided the United States”. Like, whoever wears a certain Casio watch is al Quaeda, like when you waterboard a person long enough, he will claim that 80% of other inmates are “Terrorists(TM)”. This author is out of touch with reality, and is writing with obvious political bias, to the point of being awfully dishonest. Sad, really.
I would rather hear the truth-after all, the weapons of mass destruction prefab lie killed thousands of innocent-and after spending trillions to find obl , not to mention thousands of dead u.s. and allie soldiers invading other countries . Now that obl is dead , bring home our troops from Afganistan or is the natural gas pipeline agenda more important than American lives? And also please let FREEDOM OF SPEECH remain in our constitution.
I’m glad the general public now knows what went on at Guantanamo. But I expect your old boss, George W Bush (the guy you used to write speeches for) isn’t very happy about it.
“Was it a mere coincidence that the bin Laden raid took place almost a week to the day after the release of the WikiLeaks documents? Or did U.S. officials move in to get bin Laden before al Qaeda had time to figure out that that the CIA had learned about the Abbottabad connection?”
I think a more interesting question than the one you pose here is why US officials waited even that long to send the Seals in. The US intelligence services has had this information about the link between the courier and Abbottabad since 2005 – that’s six years ago – what took them so long to join the dots? Incompetence? The fact that torture produces so much false intelligence that any good pieces of intelligence get lost in it?
And it’s been suspected that Wikileaks had the Gitmo files since at least last April (or whenever it was that Wired published Adrian Lamo’s chat logs) – so why didn’t the US take pre-emptive action against this threat of disclosure and move against OBL at least a year ago? Now, I appreciate that the compound raid must have been a complicated operation to set up and carry out – I get that – but a whole year? That doesn’t really fit in with what you’re suggesting here, which implies they can move pretty fast when they want to.
We’re told that surveillance of the Abbottabad compound started last September but I’m not sure I really buy that line (we’ve been told so many fibs about what happened on this raid already).
Here’s the odd thing – the question I really want answered – the other guy you mention, the designated courier Abd al-Khaliq Jan, well, his name was redacted from this particular cable – al-Libi’s – when it was published by the New York Times and the Guardian two weeks ago, but we haven’t seen a detainee file for Abd al Khaliq Jan himself, and we’re not going to either, because his is one of the dozen or so files that are missing from the Wikileaks database (although he’s still at Guantanamo).
Obviously, this means his file has been ‘missing’ since at least April 2010, or whenever the Guantanamo files were first passed to Wikileaks, maybe even February 2010 – so what I want to know is, why is that?
Or, J Zman, they were waiting for the opportunity to nab Obama at a time when it would be most politically advantageous.
How curious that all this information comes out on pentagon sanctioned torture techniques and the failing war on terror, then all of a sudden Bin Laden is caught using waterboarding (yay torture!), the mission seems worth it (how many lives and how many trillions of dollars for one man’s head?) and we’re back in a ‘vulnerable position’ awaiting retaliation from Al Qaeda and relying on Uncle Sam to protect our arses. Fear, of course, breeds loyalty – loyalty has been waning in the face of Wikileak’s exposed government lies.
The Government has ceased to serve the people, but has become a network of commercially motivated despots spinning an eternal web of deceit around the populace, strangling them into unconsciousness with the filament of their dirty PR campaign.
Wikileaks is a long-thirsted for panacea and your further attempts to cloud people’s judgement will not work.
Here are some things that the Obama administration has actually done.
1. Successfully pressured MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Bank of America, and others to suspend all support for private donations to Wikileaks.
2. Successfully pressured Amazon to cease hosting the site, and using this example to keep it off the servers of any other major firm.
3. Pressured Sweden and England to extradite him (complicated, I might add, by the previous administration’s casual disregard of the Geneva Conventions, which places the value of our extradition treaties into question).
4. Set a severe example to other potential leakers by subjecting Private Manning to extreme isolation for an extended period without a trial.
5. Has continued to discourage further leaks by prosecuted more whistleblower cases than every other administration combined (and that’s only 2.5 years into the term).
6. Has convened a Grand Jury to (yes) indict Assange.
7. Has convened a Grand Jury to investigate and indict Anonymous, the online collective that responded to the actions of MC/Visa by launching DoS (denial of service) attacks on their websites.
8. Placed various known associated of Assange on extreme travel watch, meaning that their laptops and cellphones are confiscated each and every time they cross a US border.
9. Has subpoenaed every major social networking site for the personal details of every known associate who may be active on these networks. This was a secret effort, until Twitter revealed to a member of the Icelandic Parliament (a target of one of these probes) that this was happening, threatening to provoke a minor diplomatic incident.
And these, of course, are merely the better known examples. As a former Senior White House staffer, you should know better than most that there’s usually far more going on that what the public can see. Nevertheless, in your “judgement” (I use the word loosely) all this constitutes “virtually nothing”.
Really?
How can you say that? Is it a matter of near-total ignorance? Are you truly this uninformed? Or, in your view, is all this so inconsequential as to amount to ‘virtually’ nothing.
If so, would you care to print what you consider “something”?
If – specifically – this included indictments, what do you think the Grand Jury is doing right now? Do you even know what a Grand Jury is? Honestly, sir, just how big ARE the gaps in your education?
Does Wikileaks exposure of the incredible disregard for human rights shown again by US intelligence and military personnel not counter-balance this conjecture? Do you really think illegal activities by the US which have resulted in the deaths of so many innocents should continue to be protected from public view? Should the people never have learned that children were being imprisoned in gitmo? Have you no morals? Assange continues to improve our lives by exposing wrong doing by anyone, unfortunately for you, it is becoming obvious that one of the greatest culprits in terms of violation of rights and illegal killing is, in fact the US. Clean up your act, start behaving like a proper global citizen and Assange will have no need to publish anything about you.
Less speculation & more facts please !
Oh god
Yes the First Amendment should be ignored in case other criminals may get away. The press should not be allowed to report on occurrences if it endangers criminal investigations.
Could have, should have, would have – it didnt happen. Wikileaks exists and the bad guy was taken down. Speculate all you like the fact of the matter is transparency does more good than harm. Keeping governments in check is far more important than any single individual criminal.
This article and the claims made that the Osama raid could have taken place earlier then scheduled due to a wikileaks realease is such a blatant shot at Assange and I find it harder to believe then the US actually killing Osama. Saying Assange and wikileaks threaten national security is more ludicrous then saying your own government theatens it’s own people’s security with it’s covert operations and war mongering attempts for global dominance ala ‘stabilization’.
Seriously take a good look at Tthe US government and the lies it fabricates to create wars in which it profits off. The profits are made buy an elite few mind you whereas tax payers foot the bills. The mainstream media is in a constant state of embedment with people of power who control the country (politicians and the US military). Lies are created and fed through the media to direct a bias towards a certain event or country which in turn gains support from the public for the many shocking things undertaken by the government and the miltary. Wikileaks and Assange are pioneering what media will hopefully and should be like in the future. It is exposing the US government and a lot of it’s true intentions for what they are – war crimes brought about by a hunger for global dominance.
Further reading for one to help open his/her eyes:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27937.htm
The author doesn’t seem to understand the proper role of journalists. Investigative journalists reveal the secrets of the world’s most powerful factions — or, at least, that’s what they are supposed to do. Wikileaks has shone a flashlight on a lot of terrible behavior, such as U.S. war crimes and crimes against humanity by governments all over the world. Wikileaks revelations are credited with helping to initiate the freedom movement in the Middle East, starting with Tunisia.
Sorry if the U.S. government doesn’t like having to deal with transparency. The Gitmo files reveal that the U.S. is knowingly holding innocent people in long-term, due process-free detention. The author’s speculation that some of the files contained information relevant to Osama Bin Laden’s location, which in turn forced the U.S. to step up their timeframe for action, is pretty thin gruel to call for the lifetime imprisonment of an investigative journalist.
While the rest of the world acknowledges Julian Assange as an important advocate for transparency and human rights (as indicated by yesterday’s peace prize in Sydney), the lapdog press in the U.S. continues to parrot the government line and attempt to demonize free speech and government transparency. Funny how you can no longer tell “journalists” and government agents apart.
America is a threat to the rest of the world’s security. Support Wikileaks!
Marc Thiessen is attempting a strategy of disinformation, misdirection and hyperbole.
To wit, for the failure of the mighty United States government to keep its own “Top Secret” information secret from the world, we must prosecute a citizen of another country and “put him away for life”. I would not think that even Stalin would swim in such irony.
No wonder that this originates from the Bush Speech Writer and the bumbling idiots of that presidency after they hijacked the rights of US Citizens, attacked a foreign country using lies and falsehoods, legalized torture and killed more than 100,000+ people in that country after invading, occupying and reducing the country to civil war.
Thankfully, this megalomania and dark era in US history is over, the NeoCon’s are irrelevant and there is a new light of freedom of speech, expression and thought in the US.
It also begs the question, who should really be “put away for life”.
Try Julian Assange for what? You skip the part where the US Government has to obey the rule of law that protects citizens, and since Julian Assange is not a citizen you also skipped that part where the US Government must follow a lawful extradition process to try Julian Assange in a US court. That Assange broke the law is dubious at best and convincing a government to extradite him for a law that is dubious in the US and might be more or less dubious to a foreign government makes your suggestions seem more like an emotional outburst than a rational argument.
Secondly, the Guantanamo files have proven that the US Government has willingly held many prisoners who they knew were innocent for many years. Many were used as tools of diplomacy, some were simply mistaken identities, most had little or no physical evidence against them. It’s likely that many of these are indeed bad guys without the evidence to win a conviction in a habeus corpus court, but its certain that there are several outright victims. It is far past time for the Obama administration to indict, arrest, and try those responsible for the conditions at Guantanamo. You might dedicate an article to this fact.
It’s also interesting that in Obama’s own words, Bin Laden is responsible for “thousands” of deaths. Did you know that the Iraq war has resulted in 150,000 deaths, the vast majority of which are civilian deaths? Iraq Body Count concluded (based on documents released from Wikileaks) that 80% of the documented deaths were civilians. It is far past time for the Obama administration to indict, arrest, and try those responsible for these war crimes. You might dedicate an article to this fact.
Thank you for publishing this comment.
I hope your buddies, GW Bush and Cheney visit a country that considers them war criminals, and I hope they get every last bit of info out of them through enhanced interrogations.
Good day to you, sir.
Back in 2003, I entertained the idea that Bush had UBL in a Gitmo black site and that they would fly him out to Afghanistan and say they caught him in October of 2004 in the event that the re-election campaign was floundering.
“It is far past time for the Obama administration to indict, arrest, and try Julian Assange. His unlawful dissemination of classified materials may have almost cost us Osama bin Laden.” Yes, let’s kill everyone who *may* have done something *almost* disruptive. Genius.
Ah.. So it is possible that Obama knew where UBL was and decided to just watch for maybe months or years now in order to gain information on the entire terrorist network. And since wikileaks blew the whistle they were forced to get UBL earlier than planned at the risk of him fleeing. This makes me think about when all information is public like this maybe it generally harms the innocent ones rather than the crooks.
Of course you do. You are the puppet and your str.ings are being strategically pulled