White House: It Depends On The Meaning of "Directly"

So sayeth the country's Spin Machine in DC, regarding the question of whether information gathered by enhanced interrogation led to the kill of Usama bin Ladin.

A former counterintelligence head directly connected with interrogating al-Libbi and KSM says the information did lead to Usama bin Ladin.

A White House flack says that information did not directly lead to Usama bin Ladin.

Jose Rodriguez ran the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center from 2002 to 2005, the period when top al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and Abu Faraj al-Libbi were taken into custody and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) at secret prisons overseas. KSM was subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques. Al-Libbi was not waterboarded, but other EITs were used on him.

“Information provided by KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libbi about bin Laden’s courier was the lead information that eventually led to the location of [bin Laden’s] compound and the operation that led to his death,” Rodriguez tells TIME in his first public interview. Rodriguez was cleared of charges in the video-destruction investigation last year.

Rodriguez’s assertion drew criticism from the White House. “There is no way that information obtained by [EITs] was the decisive intelligence that led us directly to bin Laden,” says National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor. “It took years of collection and analysis from many different sources to develop the case that enabled us to identify this compound and reach a judgment that bin Laden was likely to be living there.”

Note the misleadingly off-topic nature of the denial. One man says the information led to bin Ladin; another man injects the qualifier "directly" into the discussion, and offers a denial of something Rodriguez didn't say.

Rodriguez didn't say the information led directly to Usama. What he's saying is that from the EIT's, the name of the courier was learned. And later, when the courier was finally found, that courier led to bin Ladin.

The flack adds the word "directly" to this statement, and then denies that it led directly there.

Liberals are fond of this technique of denying that which is not asserted, the denial resting upon a misleading speicific qualifier, and denying it in such a fashion as to suggest a broader denial, which the media happily repeats.

The fact is that Saddam Hussein offered bin Ladin sanctuary in Iraq. This is uncontrovertible. In the liberals'/media's telling, however, the key fact becomes "Usama bin Ladin never took sanctuary in Iraq."

Why no, he did not. He got a better offer from the Taliban. But we weren't talking about whose generous offer UBL decided to take; we were talking simply about whether Saddam had made the offer.

By endlessly repeating the part of it they want to repeat -- UBL didn't go to Iraq -- they create, with the media's assistance, the belief that Hussein never made the offer.

But he did.

Similarly, now they are going to go all-in on this "directly" denial.

It is true that if I buy a car, that car does not lead "directly" to, say, a road trip to another city. There are intervening decisions here, also critical. But the purchase of the car is necessary for the ultimate outcome of my going on a road trip.

Without the courier's name, there is no kill of UBL. That is the fact.

Cheap obfuscations of this fact by paid liars and reality-benders -- which is what spokesmen are -- does not change that fact.

posted by Ace at 12:29 PM

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