The Senate Intelligence Committee skirted making a conclusion about how al-Libi's statements were extracted. But the al-Libi case demonstrated one of the practical risks of coercing a witness to talk. To avoid pain, people often make stuff up.
Buying Time
Though al-Libi's motivation appeared to be simply his desperation to avoid more pain, there is also the risk that al-Qaeda operatives intentionally "surrendered" intelligence that was designed to divert U.S. attentions away from the crucial terrorist base camps and safe houses along the Afghan-Pakistani border and toward Iraq.
As the U.S. military got bogged down in the Iraq War, al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies strengthened their safe havens inside Pakistan and began expanding their areas of control, threatening to destabilize the fragile government of Pakistan, the only Islamic country that has a nuclear bomb.
There has been other evidence that al-Qaeda's leaders understood the value of tying down the U.S. military in an open-ended war in Iraq, so they could reorganize and emerge as a more deadly threat in the future, especially if Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falls into their hands.
Osama bin Laden even intervened in Election 2004 by releasing a rare videotape on Oct. 29, 2004, railing against President Bush. Bush's supporters immediately dubbed the video tape "Osama's endorsement of John Kerry."
But inside the CIA, analysts concluded that the video was intended as a backdoor way to help Bush gain a second term, according to Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders.
According to Suskind's book, CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons."
"Their [the CIA's] assessments, at day's end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today's conclusion: bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection.
"At the five o'clock meeting, [Deputy CIA Director] John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: 'Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.'"
McLaughlin's comment drew nods from CIA officers at the table. The CIA analysts felt that bin Laden might have recognized how Bush's policies--including the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the endless bloodshed in Iraq--were serving al-Qaeda's strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists. (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
"Certainly,"- CIA's deputy associate director for intelligence Jami Miscik said, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years," according to Suskind's account.
As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts drifted into silence, troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. "An ocean of hard truths before them--such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected--remained untouched," Suskind wrote.
One consequence of bin Laden breaking nearly a year of silence to issue the videotape the weekend before the U.S. presidential election was to give the Bush campaign a much needed boost. From a virtual dead heat, Bush opened up a six-point lead, according to one poll.
