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 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.
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.
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