Bin Laden Is Dead; Guantanamo Must Be Closed

The news of the death of bin Laden, killed in Pakistan on May 2 by an elite commando from the American Army,* had hardly reached the halls of the Capitol when the architects of the counterterrorism apparatus, put in place by the Bush team, raised their heads.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, his secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo, the lawyer who legalized the use of torture, all were quick to defend their position. There it is, they exclaimed, the proof that we were right! That justifies all of the criticism we received from high-minded Democrats about the CIA’s secret prisons, Guantanamo Bay camp and waterboarding.

Their reasoning is simple. If the American captors had not used “enhanced interrogation techniques” — a mild euphemism referring to various forms of torture like the waterboarding, which gives the detainee the feeling of drowning — in questioning suspects post-Sept. 11, they would have never succeeded in extracting the valuable information that led to the capture of the head of al-Qaida.

Nothing is further from the truth. The story given by the former people in charge of intelligence, who have been questioned over the last few days by the American press, together with a detailed examination of the secret files from Guantanamo, passed onto several newspapers by WikiLeaks, including Le Monde, show that it is not the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “mastermind of Sept. 11” — who was subjected to at least 183 sessions of waterboarding, according to the CIA — that was the crucial factor. Certainly, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew about the existence of bin Laden’s messenger, but he misled his interrogators, giving a false name and minimizing his importance.

It was finally a range of sources of intelligence about this messenger, mostly gathered from detainees — about whom it has not been established if they have been tortured — that put the Americans on the trail of the messenger and, thanks to him, onto the hideout of bin Laden, near Islamabad.

Torture is immoral and illegal. The French have been faced with this question on several occasions throughout their history, and they know that: Our newspaper even took part in the fight against the use of torture in Algeria. What we know less about is that torture is also counterproductive. There is no lack of intelligence experts, either in France or in the United States, to testify to that.

It is not easy for the former members of Bush’s team to admit that it is finally the one who banned “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Barack Obama, who is reaping the fruits of 10 years of tracking and laborious tasks in order to give the public the trophy of bin Laden. But nothing can come from hiding the truth. It now remains for President Obama to deal with the other disastrous repercussions of Sept. 11: tell the truth about the CIA’s secret prisons, shed light on the missing prisoners and especially, close Guantanamo.

*Editor’s Note: Osama bin Laden was killed by a Navy SEAL team on May 2.