FEW WILL miss Osama bin Laden or regret his demise, or deny that President Obama has pulled off a remarkable coup, a major and welcome setback for al-Qaeda. But the partial unravelling of details of the bin Laden raid story in intervening days has muddied the waters, amplifying nagging questions about White House credibility, playing into doubts about the legality of the killing, and tarnishing the achievement.
The White House communications foul-up – admittedly, hastily corrected – will also certainly, unfortunately, be grist to the mill of the conspiracy theorists who populate the fringes of US politics and the Islamist world. The “silliness” which Mr Obama denounced in “birthers” recently will be as nothing compared to what is almost certain to come soon from the same quarter.
We now know, contrary to first reports from the administration, that bin Laden was not “killed in a firefight”, was not armed though he had weapons at arm’s reach, did not use his wife as a shield, and lived in a house that was not nearly as ostentatious as the $1 million valuation originally stated. The Seals were engaged in only the briefest of exchange of fire early in the operation, and the downed helicopter’s failure was not “mechanical”. Nor was the White House Situation Room watching the live action, as we understood. Fear that an information vacuum would be filled by rumour and al-Qaeda, and, no doubt, a desire to paint bin Laden in the worst possible light led to ill-advised, ill-informed briefings, and the inevitable backtracking.
What we do not yet know are the precise instructions to the Seals in this regard – anonymous briefings that they had been instructed not to take him alive were denied, replaced by vague, largely implausible, assertions that, of course, if he had clearly surrendered he would not have been shot. Such ambiguity dangerously feeds the arguments of those who argue that this was simply cold-blooded and extra-judicial execution.
The decision, however, after a somewhat public debate inside the administration, to withhold the gruesome photos of the dead man makes sense. In truth those minded to believe the body is not bin Laden’s will remain unconvinced by photos, and the propaganda value of gory pictures would undoubtedly be huge.
The operation has also reignited the debate in the US about the value of "enhanced interrogation" – torture, to put it plainly. Its apologists, notably officials from the Bush administration, have revelled in suggestions that titbits of information gleaned from waterboarding pointed to bin Laden's location, and hence vindicated its use. That is far from clear. A detailed study by the New York Timesof the lengthy information trail concludes convincingly that torture "played a small role at most" some years ago, while the paper quotes numerous interrogators insisting that the best information came from prisoners who were not tortured.
Torture’s immorality apart, its practice is deeply counterproductive and has hugely damaged the standing of the US and its intelligence operations. It is an ignominious chapter which President Obama has rightly closed.